With a growth of around 20 per cent from India market, Australia has welcomed 335,100 travellers from India year ending June. The destination has also witnessed an increase in terms of average spends per traveller. Now, the destination is focusing to attract the high value travellers who can significantly contribute to the overall Nation’s economy.
Speaking about the new strategy Nishant Kashikar, Country Manager, India & Gulf, Tourism Australia said, “Recently, we have moved from demographic targeting to psychographic targeting. We now target a segment called high value travellers who contribute significantly to the Australian economy. The launch of the Signature Experiences of Australia which are products like Great Walks, Luxury Lodges, Wineries, Golf courses are not located in the cities but are in the surrounds. This will increase length of stay and spends per person. We will promote these new products this year. The interest of the states in Australia is growing and they want to drive tourism to their regions. We are interested in travellers who can spend more so we are majorly targeting Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Kolkata, Chennai, Ahmedabad, Pune, and Hyderabad. These eight cities have 80 per cent of the affluent households in the country. These markets will contribute to the tourism growth in future growth.”
Tourism Australia recently organised the 16th edition of India Travel Mission 2018 (ITM2018) in Jaipur. This year’s edition witnessed 75 Australian tourism businesses to meet with 87 travel retailers from India in over 6,500 business appointments over three days. The event witnessed participation from 14 first time seller participants and 20 buyer companies.
Speaking about the event Brent Anderson, Regional General Manager, South & South East Asia, Tourism Australia said, “India is a significant market for Australia and has been seeing a very encouraging growth trend. This is our biggest offshore event in terms of the number of Australian delegation. India is the number one market in terms of growth hitting 335,000 arrivals. In terms of arrivals India is up by 20 per cent and in terms of spend this market is up by 15 per cent. We see a great potential in this market. We are soon launching a new campaign in India which has been localised for this market.”
During this ITM, Tourism Australia introduced Signature Experiences –a collection which offers diverse range of travel options including Australian Wildlife Collection, Great Golf Courses of Australia, Great Walks of Australia, Luxury Lodges of Australia and the Ultimate Winery Experiences of Australia for the Indian market.
The India market has achieved most of its core goals which were set for 2020. Anderson added, “In 2012, Nishant led the development of India 2020 strategy which had three key goals and we are proud that two of those goals have already been hit three years early. The first goal was 300,000 arrivals which has been achieved in December 2017. We now have another internal target which is 500,000 by 2020. 2018 again we will see double digit growth. The second goal for us was to rank in top six for out of region travel for Indians. We achieved this goal in 2016. Our last goal is to achieve spend of AU$ 1.9 billion and we are currently at AU$1.53 billion. So by June 2019, we look to achieve this.”
