Tourism Australia, Managing Director, Robin Mack at the CAPA Airline Leader Summit Australia Pacific 2026

Transcript

Robin Mack:In terms of current demand, and obviously there's been some frictions that have been taking place with the Middle East impact, we're still seeing across the whole of 2026 there's more seats that are going to be coming into Australia than there were in 2025. So there's still an increase even with those adjustments. And that's more seats than we've ever had coming into the destination. In terms of performance, looking at the 12 months to May, which is the latest data we have, we got to about 9.2 million arrivals from around the world, which is 9.5% up on the previous 12 months. We're obviously looking closely at the future outlook and we look at forward bookings, but there's still some positive signs from many of our markets that the growth potential is there. Some have had adjustments, particularly those using the Middle East hub, If I think of the UK, there's been a drop from that market, but it's also off a record high in 2025 thanks to the Ashes and Rugby Series that took place here. So we were expecting a bit of a drop. So our role at Tourism Australia is to create demand, and we do that with our global campaign, Come and Say G'day, running our 16 markets around the world. But then we look to take that aspiration into visitation by doing partnership with our airlines around the world. We work with 24 of them in all of our markets, They're a key part of what we do. You know, we are creating that demand, but how do we convert it? And that's where airlines come in, and they're a key partner for us in every market. So in terms of what we target at Tourism Australia, there's 16 markets that we're active with around the world. We actually just completed a 10-year strategic outlook, our Tourism 2035, and that looks at the markets and where the potential for growth is for Australia. If we look at that first horizon in our strategy to 2028, We believe the incremental growth will be in the big 4 markets that we have today, which is New Zealand, UK, US, and Greater China. But if we look also where the incremental growth is coming from in the biggest gain, the ASEAN region, we believe, has great potential for future growth. In terms of growth for Australia overall, we do see great potential and great opportunities ahead. We actually, from a leisure perspective, if we look at inbound leisure spend and business event spend, which are the 2 target customers that we focus on, in 2025 we had $33 billion in terms of economic value that was coming into Australia. We believe, and we've just done some work out to the next 20— 10 years, 10 to 2035, that we'll increase that between $61 and $69 billion. So more than doubling, and we think there's great potential for that. Obviously, a key part of that is getting our airlines supporting the destination, increasing their services in the future. But we know we're a high-yielding destination for them and for us in terms of attracting customers from all around the world.

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