Aussies roll out red carpet for Indians

ITM 2017 witnessed a record 200 delegates congregating in Pune, Maharashtra, over 4 days of business meetings. Brent Anderson, Regional General Manager, South/South East Asia, Tourism Australia, shares why this year’s ITM Pune was bigger and how Tourism A

QHow different is this year’s ITM from the previous ones?

This year’s India Travel Mission (ITM) is special for us for three reasons–we are celebrating our 50th anniversary, this is the 15th edition of ITM and lastly, we have a record number of delegates this ITM with 84 seller delegates and 110 buyer delegates. Also, this year we have had 275,000 visitor arrivals from India to Australia, growth being at 15.3 per cent. There were 31,000 visitors from India during the month of May 2017, a 13 per cent increase over May 2016. This was the highest ever visitation in any given month from India to Australia. This is the fourth consecutive year we have witnessed double digit growth in the arrivals. For the year ending March 2017, Indian visitors spent AUD 1.34 billion (` 6,400 crore) on their Australian trips, an increase of 18 per cent over the previous year.

QHow are you working with airlines to increase capacity from India market?

Aviation access is very critical for any destination and we have got eight airlines to fly into Australia and work with us, offering some great fares. We have achieved phenomenal success by having 10,200 bookings in the first phase and 18,100 bookings in the second phase, in a span of three weeks. Some of our broadcast projects with Indian television channels like Star Plus, Sun TV, Zee Marathi etc. have helped us increase awareness and attract tourists from India. The growth we have been recording is the result of these initiatives. We would want the airlines to increase capacity out of the Indian market. We would want Air India to add more flights to Australian cities. We’d want Singapore Airlines and Malaysia Airlines to add more capacity not just from India to Singapore or Kuala Lumpur but from Singapore to Australia and Kuala Lumpur to Australia. Our campaigns help the airlines to increase their load factors which help them to drive yield and get more profits and once you have profitable routes, you increase capacity out of those markets.

QHow do you see introduction of e-visa for Indian visitors? We have recently announced the launch of evisa applications for Indian passport holders, which will give a boost to the numbers. Tourism Australia has been active in 15 markets and India has been a key growing market for us. We see India growing to its potential in the next 7 to 10 years and it will be in one of our top 5 markets by 2025.

As far as visa facilitation is concerned, the Australian immigrations system is always considered as a benchmark by other immigrations departments. We are the first ones to announce the preferred breaking programme which provided visa processing to 105 top agents in India. Then we launched the electronic allotment of visa applications for preferred agents and later on, we launched threeyear multiple-entry visa for Indians having sound travel history. The introduction of e-visas will encourage corporates to choose Australia for their next business event.

QHow has the share of travellers increased to Australia?

Business travellers account for 12 per cent of our total arrivals from India market into Australia. Holiday purpose visitation share has increased from almost 19 per cent to 27 per cent over the last 4-5 years. Holiday spend over the last three years has gone up to 18 per cent. Per capita spend on holidays has gone up from AUD 3,000 to AUD 4,000. Repeat visitation on holidays has gone up from 22 per cent to 33 per cent. We would like to target 300,000 Indian visitor arrivals this year.

To achieve this, we have been following an integrated brand approach. We have been using the digital mediums and have seen a significant increase in our digital spend. We work closely with our distribution and airline partners. Working with the travel trade will also be an important aspect of our strategy. Currently, our focus is on eight markets and for B2C markets our focus is on three markets namely Maharashtra, Delhi and Karnataka. When it comes to our PR and distribution activities, we focus on other five markets, making it six metros and then adding Ahmedabad and Pune to it. These are our geographical focus markets as they contribute to 80 per cent of our total arrivals.

QHow has the response been for Aussie Specialist programme this year?

Under the Aussie Specialist programme, almost 7400 Indian agents have enrolled, a 24 per cent increase over the previous year. Out of these 7400 agents, there are 3400 agents who are qualified Aussie Specialists in the country. Apart from this programme, we have also trained 1200 travel agents across the country.

We have recently announced the launch of e-visa applications for Indian passport holders which will give a boost to the numbers. Tourism Australia has been active in 15 markets and India has been a key growing market for us. We see India growing to its potential in the next 7 to 10 years and it will be in one of our top 5 markets by 2025. Brent Anderson

QWhat are the market strategies to drive growth from India market?

Overall strategy for 2017-18 is to drive yield and by that we tend to increase spend per person, which is only possible by making people stay for longer durations. For this we will be adding new destinations and products for which ITM is a perfect platform. India’s overnight visitor spend has the potential to reach up to AUD 1.9 billion. Since the launch of the India 2020 programme, our budgets for the India market has doubled.