A recent household income survey in Australia has found that Australians are still spending big on travel despite the rise in cost of living.
And Fiji is well positioned to benefit from the trend, said Tourism Fiji chief executive officer Brent Hill.
“The interesting thing is we’ve seen a lot of data around the resilience, or to use a sexier economic term, decoupling of travel from household spending. Recently, Ord Minnett put out a survey where the percentage of household income spent (in Australia) on travel was growing and showing no signs of stepping back,” Mr Hill said in response to questions asked at this week’s Reserve Bank of Fiji Tourism Seminar in Suva, in which he delivered an update on Fiji’s tourism market.
“We can’t presume that will last forever. But there is a decoupling of travel where people go: ‘you know what, the world is so hard, so difficult, et cetera, et cetera, but the one thing I’m not compromising on is my holiday. I must go on holiday’.”
Fiji, he said, was in a unique position in that it was the preferred destination when Australians and New Zealanders do travel.
“We’re seeing that. Australia (Australian tourists coming into Fiji this year) is 115 per cent above 2019. Now, we’d like to think that’s because of our marketing and PR and whatever – and it’s a bit of that – but it is still about the Aussies saying: ‘I will still want to go on holiday. Fiji looks like a great proposition and maybe we’ll do the big trip to Europe or the big trip to the US down the track.”
While there have been concerns about the impact of Australia’s interest rates hikes to dampen inflation and Australians having to manage their mortgage payments because of it, which may rule holidays out of their budgets, Mr Hill said the opposite was in fact, true.
“The percentage that has been spent on travel in terms of household income is actually growing. And there’s a lot of research that says it’s resilient to some of those effects, so even if we go further and further down with mortgage shock, et cetera, I have a property still in Australia and I came off that fixed rate cliff eight months ago, as did loads of other people, but still the Aussies are coming in record numbers.
“So it does show that there is resilience in that space,” Mr Hill said.
He said despite the positive vibes from Fiji’s two big neighbours, Tourism Fiji’s promotions would remain relentless in those markets.
“We absolutely are not taking our foot off the gas. It’s not like we’re going: ‘OK, let’s go to India or let’s go to Korea at the expense of Australia, New Zealand.’ We have to keep pushing in those markets that are closest to us and where we get the growth.”
According to the 2022 International Visitors Survey Highlights released annually by the Ministry of Trade, Fiji welcomed 636,312 international visitors in 2022 of which 89 per cent were from Australia, New Zealand and the US and 54 per cent were from Australia alone.