Domestic Tourism boom continues; we’re now above 2 years ago

Posted on July 10, 2021 by Pete Faulkner - QLD, Tourism, Uncategorized

The Monthly Snapshot domestic tourism data from TRA for April, released yesterday, shows how strongly this sector continues to perform. overnight Expenditures across Australia lifted to $8.16 bn and are now 6.5% higher than they were 2 years ago in April 2019 (even allowing for 3.8% growth in CPI over that time we are still looking at a 2.7% real growth).

However, over the two years the growth has been far from uniform; NSW is up 14.9% while WA is still down 7.2%. Victoria, because of the challenges of an extended lock-down, managed to add only 1.5%.

In Queensland we have seen very solid performance in Regional QLD (which was up 14.8%) while Greater Brisbane & Gold Coast barely changed, up just 0.2%. As a result the Queensland result came in only slightly better than the national average at 8.6%.

Despite these strongly improving monthly results, over the course of the past 12 months the tourism industry has seen a huge decline in domestic tourism (not to mention the loss of all international tourism!). When we consider the annual total to April 2021 with the same period to April 2020 across Australia we see a decline in expenditures of 26.1%. NSW is down 17.6%, Victoria down 47.4% while Queensland has done relatively well and is down 21.0%. Again, the difference between the Regional QLD (down just 8.3%) and Greater Brisbane & Gold Coast (down 35.6%) is stark.