Key Points
- Australian tourists spend nearly a fifth of their holiday budget on experiences and nightlife.
- A new report has found that Australian travellers prioritise experiences over retail therapy when abroad.
- Fiji, Bali, Tokyo, Queenstown, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, and Osaka have experienced tourism booms since the pandemic.
Australian tourists are the highest spenders globally on experiences and nightlife, spending nearly one out of every five holiday dollars on these activities, the report found.
“There is a difference in preferences, when folks from Australia are travelling around, they are doing it more for the experiences – that is more of the preference, rather than the retail therapy,” Mastercard chief economist David Mann told the Australian Associated Press.
Source: SBS News
The report draws on aggregated anonymised data from Mastercard customers to examine their spending while abroad.
It found Fiji, Bali, Tokyo, Queenstown, Kuala Lumpur, Manila and Osaka had gained the most momentum with Australian travellers since the COVID-19 pandemic when comparing their share of flight bookings in recent months with a similar period in 2019.
“We’ve been seeing the extra incentives to picking Japan over other places just because it is so relatively cheap, and it also has all of the things that people are looking for in terms of the experiences of dining, or going on skiing holidays, and there’s the cultural things that you can do that are relatively unique,” he said.
“It’s a place with rapid growth, middle-class evolution, and demand for travel. The number of planes being ordered is large, and so the capacity is going to go up a lot.”
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