Time for Cairns to change its game
US,” Mr Salt said, considering the numbers.
“Then of course New Zealand dominated, then the Japanese came in.
“The reality is the Japanese only held that dominance for barely a decade, then the New Zealanders have come back.
“In fact it was just the year before last, 2018, where New Zealanders have been knocked off and the Chinese arrived (at the top of the list).”
Australia attracted more than 800,000 Japanese visitors in 1998 at the peak of the boom – that figure is dwarfed by the 1.4 million Chinese who came in 2018.
Bearing in mind there are still about 470,000 Japanese arrivals, 733,000 from the UK, 789,000 from the US and 1.3 million Kiwis, and with the rest of the world, prosperity awaits Cairns if it can prove itself a must-visit destination.
Mr Salt’s bold airport precinct expansion must be part of that strategy, if only for the extra jobs it would create.
“Airports clearly are a piston in metropolitan areas and regions,” he said.
“It’s why the Sunny Coast and Coolangatta are driving growth out of the airport.
“It’s not just the airport, it’s all the spin-off activities attached to that, which really should be captured in that big, grand, muscular strategic plan with ambition.”
Experience Co CEO John O’Sullivan believed the focus should first be on securing more international flights.
“You can take the attitude ‘build it and they will come’, or you can create demand – and that is the most important thing right now,” Mr O’Sullivan argued.
“Let’s create demand around the region so airlines can say: ‘OK, create us a sustainable business case’.”
Mr Salt said Cairns could do more to ingratiate itself with foreign tourists, right down to rewriting street signs.
“In the mid-1990s, the Gold Coast City Council actually started translating street names into Japanese characters,” he said. “They made it bilingual.
“Should we be doing that now with Mandarin, perhaps, or Hindi?”
Mayor Bob Manning said history had shown good