ABSTRACT
Australia and Oceania occupy 6.3 per cent of the world's land area but are home to only 0.5 per cent of its population. The area is dominated by Australia, with 50 per cent of all international visitors and 80 per cent of all international expenditure. The main characteristic of travel and tourism within the Australia-Pacific (Oceania) region is the extreme remoteness of the area from either Europe or the Americas (the major source markets for incoming international tourism), and the great intraregional distances that must be covered in travelling around (Map 8.1). This is both the region's strength and its weakness, and travel costs, although now falling, are still high. Global problems tend to bypass the Australia-Pacific region, whose economy is driven by Australia – a country over thirty times the size of the UK, but with less than one-third of its population. New Zealand is more European in scale, and Australia and New Zealand together account for 97 per cent of the economy of the region and over 70 per cent of its visitors. The region has experienced steady growth in international visitors since 1997; of the eleven economies within it that report data to the World Bank all but two saw GDP growth rising in 2001, with Australia and New Zealand having the largest rises. Indeed, Australia is one of the world's fifteen largest economies. 1 The region scores highly on the three major issues that dominate international leisure travel at present – cost, safety and the availability of new or exciting experiences – and includes everything from highly cosmopolitan cities such as Sydney to unspoiled Pacific beaches, the emptiness of the outback, the landscapes of New Zealand and the wonders of the Great Barrier Reef. This unspoiled quality is a major selling point; ‘100 per cent pure’ is Tourism New Zealand's current slogan, which could reasonably be applied to all the other countries of the region as well. The region is also regarded as being safe in a way that large parts of the world are not; crime levels are lower than those in most of the countries from which visitors come. With the exception of Fiji, where past tensions seem now to have been eased, the threat of terrorism is minimal, with no internal issues likely to generate serious military or political stress in the future.
