Australia seeks to gain as China rewards workers (3)

The number of Chinese visitors travelling to Australia for business events is growing. In the 12 months to February 2013, the number of Chinese delegates visiting Australia for a convention or conference grew by 11 per cent to 15,400 visitors, whilst 66,900 Chinese visitors arrived for the purpose of business.

Tourism Australia has been backed up by a 12.5 million Australian dollar tranche of the Federal government's "Asia Marketing Fund," dedicated to growing Asian footfalls during the 2013/2014 financial year.

The Asia Marketing Fund comes on top of Tourism Australia's overall budget for destination promotion across the world.

According to McEvoy, part of the second phase of funding will be used to "up the ante on business events in Australia".

"We will invest some of the money into doing what we do well in this business events sector. That means the usual trade shows, road shows, but more importantly, efforts to get planners to come to Australia. We will be doing familiarizations bigger and better. "

Tourism Australia's efforts to attract more Chinese leisure and business travellers will get a financial boost too.

McEvoy said, "We undertook last year our second-tier city strategy in China. We have been very active in 11 cities around Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. This year we've gone into Chengdu, Chongqing and Qingdao."

Tourism Australia has beefed up its Business Events Australia website (www.businessevents.australia.com) with an intensive library of business events case studies, that officials hope will encourage further MICE delegations out of China.

Cases include a wide variety of events and visitors, from the 51st Annual International Conference of the Society of Petrophysicists and Well Log Analysts which took 623 attendees in Perth to the the 9th World Indigenous Women and Wellness Conference in Darwin which was attended by 560 delegates.

"We are using advocates to tell our story. We are letting other people tell our story because they will tell it almost more passionately and through different eyes," McEvoy said.