Outlook from Tourism Australia Managing Director, John O’Sullivan,

Australian tourism has good reasons to be optimistic about the outlook for 2015 and beyond.

International tourism to Australia has achieved five consecutive years of good growth, largely driven by continued strong demand out of Asia (most notably China) alongside the steady performance of our long standing traditional markets.

Tourism Australia Managing Director, John O’Sullivan

In the past year alone, we’ve welcomed close to 7 million visitors driven by a 7 per cent increase in visitors (for the February 2015 year-end).

Significantly, this has resulted in record levels of expenditure by international visitors ($31.1 billion - up 7%) – which means more money being spent in our hotels, restaurants, cafes and other attractions.

It has also resulted in visitor nights climbing to more than 220 million for the year.

Of our top 12 markets the majority have delivered steady growth.

China, our largest market in terms of value, grew to a record $5.7 billion for the year (up 19 per cent) off the back of a record 840,000 visitors.

Alongside this other near neighbours in the Asia also showed impressive growth in the past year, including Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong.

We also saw 16.6 per cent growth out of India and solid growth out of Indonesia.

Equally impressive too is the renewed growth from some of our longest serving markets such as the USA and the UK with Germany seeing 10 per cent growth.

A number of major events in the first quarter of 2015 – including Australian Open Tennis, AFC Asian Cup, ICC Cricket World Cup and strong Chinese New Year - have contributed to a strong start to this year.

And much work has been done to capitalise on these and other opportunities for Australian tourism.

- Tourism Australia Managing Director, John O’Sullivan