Australian Tourism In Crisis

SYDNEY (AFP)--Australia's ailing tourism industry on Thursday warned it was in crisis, after a 9% slump in arrivals in September was blamed on global economic woes with no relief in sight. There were just 432,200 international visitors to Australia in September according to Australian Bureau of Statistics figures released this week, compared with 790,600 locals jetting off overseas. It was a 9% plunge from the same period last year, with arrivals contracting in the nine months since January. The numbers of Australians taking a foreign holiday, meanwhile, has seen growth of 10.3% across the calendar year, with 5.70 million departures due to the soaring Australian dollar. Tourism Minister Martin Ferguson said global events such as Ramadan, reducing visitors from Indonesia and Malaysia, and the Rugby World Cup luring visitors to neighboring New Zealand, had made it an especially tough month. Australia's key inbound markets were also struggling, Ferguson said, with Japan working to recover from March's huge earthquake and tsunami and high levels of economic anxiety and unemployment in the U.S. and Europe. The tourism industry warned it was at breaking point after a steady decline in visitors due to the dollar's prolonged run above greenback parity, compounded by natural disasters and the recent shock two-day Qantas Airways Ltd. (QAN.AU) grounding. Resort islands were closing down across the Great Barrier Reef and jobs were being axed as visitor numbers dried up, said Tourism and Transport Forum chief John Lee. "If we were the car industry I would have already had 10 ministers ringing me up saying 'How can we help'. No one's calling," Lee said. He likened tourism's crisis to that facing the nation's auto and steelmakers and said non-mining regional Australia was "at the eleventh hour, in major shock," calling for government help for tourism-dependent towns like Cairns. "There's this general attitude or malaise in a political sense where people say 'Well, tourism's fun so we can't help them out'," he added. "What people don't realize is our industry employs six times the number of people employed in mining, we're the heavy lifter of employment in the country." Lee said the industry needed a major cultural overhaul, with no sign of recovery in Europe or the U.S. for at least 12 months, and Asian markets, especially China and India, looking to pick up the slack. "We need to put serious marketing dollars into these growth markets to cover for the losses we're getting in the traditional markets," he said. "It's really important if you want to stem the number of job losses in our industry." Chinese visitors jumped 19.2% in the nine months to September and Lee said the Asian giant would overtake the U.K. as Australia's second-biggest inbound group after New Zealand in a matter of months. (END) Dow Jones Newswires November 09, 2011 23:17 ET (04:17 GMT)