The ‘critical issue’ that could hamper Australia’s international tourism recovery

While Australia’s borders are open for quarantine-free travel for citizens, international students and some others, general tourism travel without the need to quarantine isn’t possible for arrivals from most countries.

Chief executive of Tourism and Transport Forum, Margy Osmond, says travelling is further complicated by many countries removing Australia from their safe-travel lists.

“The issue here is not so much are our borders open but are people able to come here, because the Europeans have just taken us off their so-called white list, which is the easy to travel to destinations, and the Americans have issues a travel warning about ‘Don’t go to Australia because you might get COVID’,” she told Ross and Russel.

Ms Osmond expects Australia will “be in a pretty much open situation” for tourism by June, but she says there’s a big problem we need to correct if the flow of international tourists into Australia is to bounce back.

“What’s happened during this period is we’ve lost an awful lot of our international aviation capacity. It’s gone to other parts of the world. So we need to attract those flights back,” she said.

“That’s going to be a critical issue in terms of how may travellers we get back into Australia.”

Press PLAY below to hear more about the travel rules for international arrivals