Sky-high airfares and lack of Chinese tourists hit Australian economy hard
- China used to be the biggest source of tourists for Australia, but its Covid Zero approach means Chinese aren’t travelling internationally
- Australia has raised its permanent immigration ceiling to allow up to 195,000 workers into the country every year, but expensive airfares are a deterrent
The high cost of global travel right now is fuelling Australia’s worker shortage, the country’s trade minister said, with the jobs market the tightest it’s been in almost 50 years as the coronavirus crisis eases.
Pre-pandemic, foreign students and young travellers filled a key role in the Australian labour force, working in restaurants and other service-sector jobs, Trade and Tourism Minister Don Farrell said on the sidelines of a meeting of Indo-Pacific trade ministers.
Since the country dismantled its strict pandemic border regime earlier this year, demand for these sorts of visas has been high, but would-be workers are being deterred by “capacity and cost,” he said.
Expensive airfares are “an impediment to getting things back to normal in terms of staffing,” said Farrell. A lack of flights, with airline capacity not yet back to pre-pandemic levels, is also deterring workers, he said. “We’ve got to somehow address that.”
The cost of airfare from the US to Australia had roughly tripled from pre-pandemic times. Tickets out of the UK over the northern hemisphere this summer were up by almost a third, according to online travel agency Kayak, while flights from Australia were roughly 20 per cent more in April than they were in 2019, a Mastercard Economics Institute study found.
