Tourists flock to cities
Not content with dominating the other parts of Australia's services economy, Sydney and Melbourne are now cleaning up from a tourism perspective too.
The extraordinary boom in Chinese visitors to Australia has finally slowed to an annual growth of 3 per cent at 1.3 million.
But they're still spending more, with total spend by Chinese tourists ripping 10 per cent to a record $12 billion.
Overall tourism spend hit a fresh high of $44.3 billion over the year to March 2019.
Source: TRA
Visitor numbers have been mixed from the US, despite a favourable shift in the currency, and soft from Britain.
The booming sector is now in Indian visitors, tearing another 15 per cent higher to 343,000, with total nights another 21 per cent higher year-on-year.
More than half of Indian tourists (53 per cent) state that they are VFR - visiting friends and relatives - much higher than the norm for all international tourists (30 per cent).
Source: TRA
The other growth sector is for education arrivals, up 7 per cent over the year to 586,000, with trip spend growing 9 per cent here too.
Tassie has drifted back out of favour a bit, and so too have Perth and South Australia.
Sydney and New South Wales (4.3 million visitors) and Melbourne and Victoria (3.1 million visitors), on the other hand, are becoming effective Meccas for tourists looking to deploy their cash, with soaring spend of $11.2 billion and $8.5 billion respectively!
Source: TRA
Queensland saw a boost from the Commonwealth Games in Q2 2018, but this will drop off the annual figures next quarter and normalise the results for the Sunshine State somewhat.
