Issue #162: Tourism Industry Attentions Turn to 2025 in South East Asia & Australia
Will 2025 will be the year that recovery transitions to substantive growth?
Welcome to Issue 162 of Asia Travel Re:Set.
Suitcase packed. I’m heading to London for this week’s World Travel Market - my final conference of 2024.
Across Asia Pacific, attentions are turning to 2025. Next year is viewed with high hopes and nervous uncertainty about chillier geo-economic and geo-political winds.
So let’s follow that train of thought….
Thanks for checking in.
Understanding The Power of Chinese Travellers: Trends To Capitalise On, and Pitfalls To Avoid…
See you at World Travel Market on Wednesday & Thursday (6-7 November). If you are at the show on Thursday, head over to the Purple Stage where I’ll be joining Mingjie Wang (China Daily), Alhasan Aldabbagh (Saudi Tourism Authority), Sienna Parulis-Cook (Dragon Trail International), Emanuel Lehner-Telič (Austria Tourism) and Dave Goodger (Tourism Economics) to track the new directions of Chinese outbound tourism - and highlight the misconceptions to discard!
Thailand's tourism conundrum: More tourist visitors vs higher yield.
“Growing annual arrivals matters to governments, but the economy needs higher per-visitor spending and an increase in the average length of stay.”
As South East Asian nations complete a second uninterrupted year of tourism since reopening, 2025 is viewed as a time to push on from recovery to growth. But myriad challenges await...
… These range from shifting travel patterns in key markets and the influence of AI on trip planning to climate and seasonality factors, carbon emissions, infrastructure and natural resource resilience, community disruption and financial leakage.
And, of course chillier geo-economic and geo-strategic winds seem inevitable.
So, will annual arrivals remain the chosen metric for South East Asian countries - or is strategic planning adopting High-Yield Tourism concepts?
“Thailand will want to focus on better economic yield from its visitor economy rather than relying on one-dimension metrics like annual arrivals, which takes no account of average stay, spending or travel dispersal around the country.”
Enjoyed chatting with Tommy Walker of Deutsche Welle for this new piece. CLICK HERE to read Thailand tourism aims for record-breaking arrivals in 2025.
From Self-Drive Travel & China’s Icy Winter Hotspot to Scam-Centre Tourism Fears & One Year of Whoosh!
With just 2 months to go in 2024, The South East Asia Travel Show rounds-up the top travel talking points from October in Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos and China. This week, we…
Place the media hype about self-drive travel between Malaysia and Thailand in context, and discuss the priority issues for inbound and domestic travel facing Indonesia's new tourism minister.
Assess the implications of a TV report in South Korea about alleged scam centres in Cambodia. This follows 2023’s controversial Chinese movie No More Bets. Are the concerns about Cambodia’s tourism reputation getting stronger?
Ask why Vietnamese tourists are heading to icy northern China? And why are eVTOLs back in the news after a pretty quiet year for flying taxi news?
Look back on one year of Whoosh, ASEAN’s only high-speed railway (HSR), which celebrated its first anniversary. And we address the outlook for Thailand’s under-construction HSR and Vietnam’s heavily hyped North-South HSR. When will South East Asia get another super-fast train?
Click the above live link to listen to “Self-Drive Travel, Flying Taxis & an Icy Winter Tourism Hotspot: October 2024 in Review”.
Or search for The South East Asia Travel Show on any podcast app.
Building High-Yield Tourism into Australia’s Visitor Economy Diversification Strategy
How is Australia using sophisticated data analytics and travel industry expertise to reimagine its visitor economy in the post-pandemic world?
This week on the High-Yield Tourism Podcast, I was joined by Samantha Palmer FIPAA, General Manager of Visitor Economy & Client Programs at the Australian Trade and Investment Commission (Austrade).
Sam shared fascinating insights about how Australia planned and implemented its International Diversification Strategy for the Visitor Economy - and how it is deploying a range of benchmarks to drive the programme’s next phase.
Some key questions we discussed include:
Australia uses the term ‘Visitor Economy’, which covers all visitors who travel to and within the country. These visitors are sub-divided into various segments. But what are those segments, and why do they matter?
How important is the visitor economy to Australia’s overall economic wellbeing – and how does this compare to before the pandemic?
What are the key objectives of Australia’s Diversification Strategy for the Visitor Economy? And how is it structured to bring more visitors, more spend and more yield to the visitor economy?
Where are the priority high-yield visitor markets for Australia? Are they mostly in APAC? Have these changed in recent years?
We also tapped into hot travel topics, from indigenous tourism experiences to new mountain biking trails, and the added-value of edu-tourism to new ways of promoting seasonality benefits for travellers outside of the peak periods.
Listen to "Building High-Yield Tourism into Australia's Visitor Economy Diversification Strategy" here:
Or search for High-Yield Tourism on any podcast app.
And, that’s a wrap for issue 162.
Asia Travel Re:Set will return next Sunday.
Meanwhile, find me at LinkedIn, The South East Asia Travel Show and High-Yield Tourism.
Happy travels,
Gary