The Australia-China tourism relationship

September 11 2018

It is well known that China is now Australia’s largest and most lucrative source of tourism to Australia at 1.35 million visitors and AU$11 billion annually. It is less well known that 700,000 Australians visit China annually and Australia ranks as the 13th largest source of inbound tourism to China.

The Australia-China Relations Institute (ACRI) at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) on September 11 2018 welcomed tourism experts Dr David Beirman, Senior Lecturer in Tourism, Management Discipline Group, UTS Business School; Dr George Chen, Principal Analyst and Manager of National Tourism Forecasts, Tourism Research Australia (TRA), Austrade; and Ms Sharon Dai, Head of Data Solutions, CAPA – Centre for Aviation, to explore the latest trends in Australia-China tourism on a panel moderated by Professor Bob Carr, Director of ACRI. This was followed by a Q&A session with the audience.

Time: 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm

About the panellists:

David Beirman

David Beirman is a senior lecturer in the Management Discipline Group specialising in tourism. He completed undergraduate and postgraduate degrees majoring in Sociology at the University of NSW. David has had an extensive career in the Australian travel industry, which encompassed work with retail travel agencies, wholesale tour operators, destination marketing organisations and management, human resource management and in-service industry training between 1981 and 2009. Prior to joining UTS as a full-time lecturer David had developed tourism courses and lectured part-time at UTS and other universities in tourism, marketing, Middle East studies and sociology.

George Chen

Dr George Chen is Principal Analyst and Manager of National Tourism Forecasts, Tourism Research Australia (TRA), Austrade. He specialises in producing forecasts on Australia’s inbound, outbound and domestic tourism. George is also TRA’s China tourism expert, managing research projects in this area. He has previously worked as an economist and policy advisor across various Australian Government departments including the Department of Industry and the Treasury. He has also worked as a research economist at the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation in Beijing back in the early 1990s.

Sharon Dai

Sharon Dai graduated from University of Technology Sydney (UTS), majoring in Tourism Management and International Studies (China), with a focus on aviation and Chinese language and culture. She has since become currently the Head of Data Solutions at CAPA – Centre for Aviation, a global leader in market intelligence for the aviation and travel industry. Sharon has more than 10 years of experience in the aviation industry specialising in the high potential and rapidly growing Greater China aviation market. Sharon also has over a decade of experience in aviation and financial data analysis and has driven the development of CAPA’s data toolkit, expanding CAPA’s data centre to include extensive and up-to-date company traffic and financial profiles, MRO and fleet data, a comprehensive capacity and schedules database, and an in depth and expanding suite of airline and airport databases.