Inbound tourism to Australia continued its steady rise during May with Indian market the strongest performer, recording a +20.9% increase over 2017, according to the latest ABS stats.  The biggest flops were Malaysia (-13.0%), the United States of America (-4.5%) and Singapore (-4.4%).

Meanwhile, outbound travel by Australians rebounded after a flat few months. Japan +20.9%, China +16.3% and Indonesia +11.0% recorded the best results. Worst were Thailand (-3.2%), New Zealand (-2.3%) and Fiji (-0.4%).

Startup Daily reports that Australian travel app “Seatfrog has raised $8 million in Series A funding led by European venture capital firm Octopus Ventures, with participation from existing backers including HOWZAT Partners.” Seatfrog enables users to bid for an airline seat upgrade and allow access last-minute premium seats. See story…

Graphic imagery of the forecast domination of Chinese tourists in the Australian market and part of an investor presentation by the Star Entertainment Group. Stats from Tourism Research Australia. The phrase never put all your eggs in one basket comes to mind…

Accommodation meta-search company HotelsCombined – based in Sydney, Australia – has been bought by Bookings Holding for an undisclosed sum. HotelsCombined will be absorbed into the Booking Holdings maw with management reporting to its “leading  travel metasearch brand, Kayak.” “We’ve always been inspired by the entrepreneurial culture of Booking Holdings brands,” said Hichame Assi, CEO of  HotelsCombined.  Glenn Fogel, CEO of Booking Holdings, added, “HotelsCombined has built a strong brand with loyal consumers across APAC, and we believe the team will be a great addition as we expand our worldwide meta-search strategy.”

I love Treble Cone. It’s one of my favourite ski resorts anywhere, even though it has only two real chairlifts and is run on the smell of an oily rag. The place has great spirit, views and terrain.

But now the relationship is getting stretched all because of one small thing: they don’t have snow cams. Well, they did and then they pulled them and say they are being replaced but we’re already a few weeks into winter and isn’t this a job for summer anyway?  More …

Low price supermarket Aldi has supplanted Qantas as Australia’s most trusted brand, showing the travel industry (hello TigerAir) that cheap does not have to mean nasty. Qantas is now 4th on the  Roy Morgan Net Trust Score survey.  “Nowhere is a high level of trust more important than when it comes to the provision of the food we eat,” says Roy Morgan CEO Michele Levine. More …

FlightRadar24: June 30, 2018, busiest flight day ever… “Yesterday was the busiest day of the year in the skies so far and our busiest day ever. 202,157 flights tracked! The first time we’ve tracked more than 200,000 flights in a single day on https://www.flightradar24.com

Looks like beef, takes like beef, but is a vegetarian hoax. Meet the new Impossible Burger  Air New Zealand is now serving in business class. The burger, developed by Impossible Foods from Silicon Valley, replicates meat by using an iron-rich molecule called heme derived from soy plant roots.  Heme is also found in animal meat and the result, supposedly, “is a plant-based burger patty that cooks, smells and tastes like beef but contains no animal products whatsoever.”

Village Roadshow has sold its Wet ‘n’ Wild water park in western Sydney to Spanish operator Parques Reunidos for $40m, resulting in a $25 million pre-tax loss.

Parques Reunidos is a leading global leisure park operator with more 60 ‘entertainment assets’ around the world, including 20 water parks.

Village will use the sale proceeds to pay down debt.

Queenstown is the least-cost effective international destination for Australians to fly to, according to new research from flight meta-search engine Kayak.  It says flights from Sydney to Queenstown cost an average of 16.89 cents per kilometre while Melbourne-Queenstown airfares are priced at an average of 12.2 cents a kilometre, making it the most expensive international flight destination from both cities relative to distance. This is despite an increase in capacity (tran-Tasman traffic up 24% in the year to May says QT airport). Meanwhile, Savills Hotels says hotel room rates in Queenstown increased 15% in the year to March, continuing a long-term trend. Also see: Queenstown is Being Loved to Death.

TourRadar, the most successful Australian travel company you’ve never heard of, announced overnight that it has raised a further USD50 million, money that it will use to grow staff and improve technology – with a major focus on mobile and personalisation.

So what is TourRadar? Founded by Australian brothers Travis and Shawn Pittman in 2010, TourRadar is the largest OTA in the multi-day touring market, which it estimates to be worth $55 billion. More …

Ok so you’ve got a good business. You’ve worked your tail off and now you know you’ve built a great business. Great. Good for you. You should be proud of yourself. Many fail and many just ‘survive’. To thrive is really hard and most businesses don’t. Statistics tell us that.

Now, for whatever reason you’ve made the call. It’s time to sell. More …

Serko CEO and co-founder Darrin Grafton today fulfilled a long-held ambition when his company listed on the Australian Stock Exchange.

The ASX listing supplements the travel technology company’s presence on the New Zealand Stock Exchange, where it has had a presence since 2014.

Grafton hailed the ASX listing as a “significant growth milestone. 

“Nearly 10% of Serko’s shareholder base is in Australia and being dual-listed will give us access to a larger pool of investors.” More …

Intrepid Group, the world’s largest adventure company,  has announced its results for the first time, posting a $10.7m pre-tax profit on revenues of $341m for 2017. Revenue grew quickly year on year, up almost 15%, however pre-tax earnings growth was subdued at 1.7%, suggesting an increase in costs. More …

New Zealand is on the nose with Aussie tourists, who are shunning their trans-Tasman neighbour and heading elsewhere for their holidays. The downward trajectory in Australian tourism to New Zealand in 2018 accelerated during April with a -3.3% decrease in visitor numbers compared with last year, according to the latest Overseas Arrivals and Departures figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. More …

Tourism pioneer BridgeClimb has sensationally lost its contract to run climbing tours of the iconic Sydney Harbour Bridge to Hammons Holdings, which operates Scenic World Blue Mountains, it was revealed today.

BridgeClimb, which started operations in 1998,  was founded by Paul Cave after years of lobbying the NSW Government to allow commercial climbing of the Bridge. More …

Cruise giant Royal Caribbean has plugged a gap in its portfolio through the US$1 billion purchase of a 66.7% stake in luxury and expedition line, Silversea Cruises. “Ultraluxury and expedition cruises are gaps in our portfolio today,” Royal Caribbean Chief Executive Officer Richard Fain told analysts and media following the announcement. Not any more. See Reuters coverage.

Demand continues to outstrip supply in Sydney with the city recording an all-time performance high during May. Hotel analytics company STR reports that Sydney room numbers increased 3.3% over the previous year, customers demand was up 5.6% and occupancy grew 2.3% to 84.3%.

It’s great news for a number of new properties that opened over the past 12 months, including Paramount House Hotel in inner-city Surry Hills (pictured), recently named by Gourmet Traveller magazine as its ‘Hotel of the Year’. More …

It seemed like a good idea at the time, building an international airport in 2013 on the southern coast of Sri Lanka near  Hambantota, the home town of then Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa.

But Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport has turned out to be a waste of an estimated $270 million, money the island nation cannot afford. More …

Virgin Australia Holdings today announced its CEO and Managing Director John Borghetti has resigned but will not be leaving the company until December 31, 2019 – more than 18 months from now – when his contract expires.

Borghetti started with Virgin in 2010 and his legacy is …. well, not great. More …

The Remarkables ski resort, tucked into a spectacular bowl high above Queenstown, New Zealand, today became the first ski resort in Australasia to fully open for business with an impressive cover for early June, as you can see from the image above. More …

The NSW government has finally made a decision on its regulation of short-term letting – and as expected it’s met with a mixed reaction: Airbnb is happy,  HomeAway thinks it is a retrograde step while the hotel lobby doesn’t like it at all.  In essence, the new rules place a cap of 180 rental days on renting out entire apartments or houses while there are tighter restrictions on what absent landlords can and can’t do. There is also scope for individual building managers to ban short-term rentals in their apartment block. See coverage on ABC and Domain.

Rising fuel and labour costs are the reasons behind a profit downgrade for global airlines from the International Air Transport Association (IATA), which is forecasting a collective net profit of USD33.8 billion  for its members in 2018 . “This is a solid performance despite rising costs, primarily fuel and labor, but also the upturn in the interest rate cycle,” IATA said, lowering the previous forecast of USD38.4 billion. While operating profits for airlines have been trending downwards for the past four years, “the industry’s financial foundations are strong with a nine-year run in the black that began in 2010. At long last, normal profits are becoming normal for airlines.”

AccorHotels today completed the purchase of Mantra Group and its 138 properties in Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii and Bali for $1.2 billion, a process that took much longer than originally expected when the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission delayed its decision on the deal. More …

Jeff Cavins is something of an anomoly – a person who runs a ‘sharing economy’ business, Outdoorsy, and promotes the fact that  some people using his Recreational Vehicle and caravan marketplace are ‘power sellers’ he says can turn over millions of dollars a year through the site.

“Just like Airbnb, we’ve seen the emergence of power sellers on our platform – some members of our community own more than 100 RVs vehicles and are  doing millions and millions of dollars a year in business.” More …

For years the best advice to increase organic reach on Facebook was to publish video content. But since Facebook altered its Newsfeed algorithm in January to drive more meaningful social interactions, the platform’s love of video appears to be over. For tips on how to adapt your Facebook strategies to the new paradigm, check out this post from Nick Henderson, Tourism Australia’s Global Manager of Social Media, 

 What is Adventure Travel? Glad you asked because if ever the truth in travel marketing can be stretched it’s the definition of adventure – which these days can mean everything from eating (relatively) exotic food to touring bucolic Italy, where (ironically) over-tourism is a very real issue, or cruising the Greek Islands.  More …