Tourism
Issue No. 50 - December/ /
Air access key to tourism success
Increasing air access to South Australia is one of the keys to reaching the goal of making tourism a $6.3 billion industry by 2014, according to the South Australian Tourism Commission.
Planning to increase weekly domestic passenger seat capacity to 100,000 and international weekly seat capacity to 10,000 in that time, the SATC and its partners have already made progress.
There are now more than 66,500 domestic airline seats arriving in Adelaide each week, up from 45,500
in 2003.
Tiger Airways’ second Australian base was launched at Adelaide Airport in March 2009, and the airline is forecasting an extra 5 million passengers coming to SA during the first eight years of its operations.
In July, Tiger Airways staarted flying the Adelaide to Sydney route, which has since increased to a double daily service, bringing the total number of weekly Tiger Airways’ flights into Adelaide to 41, up from 14 when Tiger started flying here in January last year.
Tiger is now flying into its Adelaide base from Sydney, Melbourne, the Gold Coast, Hobart and Alice Springs and Canberra. The carrier is set to bring
more than 375,000 seats into Adelaide during the next 12 months.
“These are low-cost inbound seats that did not exist less than a year ago,” SATC chief executive Andrew McEvoy says.
Jetstar also increased services recently, and now offers 54 weekly return services to Adelaide, including direct flights from Sydney, Melbourne, the Gold Coast, Brisbane, Perth, Darwin and Cairns.
In the international arena, there is also progress being made: 31 international flights per week now fly into Adelaide, up from 13 in 2003.
But Andrew says SA, with 1.6 million people, is still underserviced by international airlines.
“Our performance over the past seven years shows that when seat capacity increases, the market soaks it up – particularly when the new seats are low cost,” he says.
“There is ...
