By Paritosh Parasher, IANS,
Melbourne : Tourism Australia has become the latest Australian organization to express interest in milking the burgeoning, and cash rich, Indian middle class.
The Australian government owned tourism promotion body has announced a campaign to attract high-spending tourists from India. The campaign also aims to dispel any apprehension in Indian visitors’ minds resulting from widely reported incidents of attacks on South Asian students Down Under.
Tourism Australia’s managing director Andrew McEvoy has told Australian media that prior to the attacks on Indian students, Australia was seen as a very welcoming nation. Andrew McEvoy believes Australia is an incredibly appealing destination to Indians but the nation’s image is yet to recover from the negative publicity in the wake of aforementioned attacks on the Indian students.
“We took a view that we should look at India through the eyes of Indians whom we market (to). So we’ve used an MTV Bollywood couple who had their honeymoon in Australia as sort of the front people of our advertising,” he said.
“We’ve done a lot of work to rebuild the image and I think the High Commission has done a great job over there. So we’re certainly back on track and there are big opportunities to come,” McEvoy was reported as saying by ABC Radio.
According to media reports, Indian visitors and temporary residents like students are currently contributing anything between $800 million and $820 million to the Australian economy.
“There’s probably around 145,000 Indians who are coming, including students and holidayers, visiting friends and relatives, and business,” Andrew McEvoy further said.
According to a Tourism Australia projection, the tourist flow from India to Australia is likely to triple by 2020 if the full potential is realised.
“We think by 2020 that could almost triple to about $2.4 billion at its best and that would mean there’d be 400,000 Indians coming to our country … a mix again of education, holiday, business and visiting friends and relatives,” Tourism Australia Managing Director added.
(Paritosh Parasher can be contacted at [email protected])