Lead Story
Issue No. 18 - August/September 2004
Tourism Duty
by Professor Richard Blandy
My wife and I, together with another Adelaide couple, recently returned from six weeks as tourists in Croatia, Venice, Spain and Portugal. There are lessons and conclusions from this experience that may be of value in thinking about the future of tourism in South Australia.
According to the recently released Australian Government Tourism White Paper, tourism directly contributed about 4.5 per cent to Australia’s gross domestic product in 2001-02. Tourism, especially international tourism, is growing very rapidly and is destined to play an even bigger role in economic development over the next few decades. If we don’t get tourism right we could either “miss out’ or “stuff up” quite significantly.
The World Tourism Organisation expects international tourism to grow by 4.1 per cent a year up to 2020 reaching 1.56 billion tourists in that year. International tourist arrivals in Europe will grow by 3.0 per cent a year reaching 717 million in 2020 (compared with 338 million in 1995, and 527 million in 2010), while international tourist arrivals in East Asia and the Pacific are expected to grow by 6.5 per cent a year from 81 million in 1995 to 195 million in 2010 and reaching 397 million in 2020. At these rates, by 2040 East Asia and the Pacific will reach nearly 1.4 billion international arrivals surpassing Europe at 1.3 billion arrivals.
Australia has about 3.5 per cent of the Asia/Pacific international tourism market and receives about 4.8 million international tourists a year. The Australian Tourism Forecasting Council expects international visitor arrivals to increase by 6.2 per cent a year up to 2013, close to the World Tourism Organisation’s expectation for East Asia and the Pacific as a whole. At these growth rates, we can expect about 7 million international tourists in 2010, about 14 million in 2020 and about 50 million in 2040 (ten times the present number)!
South Australia attracts about 7.5 per cent of present interna...
