Sovereign Hill marketing director Garry Burns, a keynote speaker at a Destination Southern Tasmania summit today, says the Victorian open air museum and historical goldmine park has reached iconic status with Chinese tourists because it was one of the first Australian tourism businesses to engage with the Chinese market.
More than 100,000 Chinese tourists visit Sovereign Hill each year.
“China is a challenging market,” Mr Burns said.
He said Tasmania was one of the world’s leading high-end nature-based destinations.
“It’s not all about numbers, it can be about yield and purse spend.”
Sovereign Hill has an office in Shanghai where Sovereign Hill international sales manager Jessica Xue works.
Ms Xue said Mt Wellington was a must-do destination on her first trip to Tasmania in October last year and was the first place she visited. The mountain was covered in snow, she said.
“Chinese will like the view.”
Destination Southern Tasmania chief executive Melinda Anderson said Tasmanian visitor numbers from China had grown from 4000 in the year ending March 2009 to more than 23,000 during the year ending March 2016.
“That’s an incredible 600 per cent growth,” she said.
The trend has seen strong growth leisure visitors to the state which was temporarily boosted by an influx of Chinese business travellers around the time of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit in November 2014.
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