Flight bookings from China to Australia for October 2026 rose 19 per cent compared with October 2025, International Air Transport Association data showed. Australia ranked among the most sought-after destinations during China's week-long national holiday, from October 1 to 7.
Trip.com said Chinese travellers were booking "longer and further trips beyond the region" this year. The Mid-Autumn Festival public holiday fell alongside Golden Week, giving people 13 days off. China's official immigration data showed more than 2.2 million inbound and outbound passengers travelled during the Mid-Autumn Festival, a 16.8 per cent increase on the same holiday last year.
On the Ground in Australia
Fei Chang and her husband spent the holiday in Australia. They were surprised by the number of Chinese tourists they met in the Whitsundays. "At some tourist spots, it felt like I could almost speak Mandarin to everyone," Chang said. They also visited beaches in Sydney.
Small tourism businesses are seeing the surge arrive fast. Zhang Cheng, a Melbourne travel agent and owner of Great Wall Travel Services, said she had received a flood of bookings over the past week. "We are fully booked with two-day tours to the Great Ocean Road," she said. This week, she was taking a group of Chinese-speaking tourists to Canberra for one of the Southern Hemisphere's biggest horticultural shows.
Zhang's agency mostly serves Chinese-speaking tourists, though she said she couldn't be sure how many came from overseas and how many from Australia's own Chinese-speaking community. That gap matters. It's a reminder that the people filling these tours include residents with deep roots in Australian communities, not only visitors passing through.
A Market Still Short of Its Old Peak
The rebound is real, but it hasn't restored what the pandemic took away. Tourism Research Australia says China was Australia's second-largest inbound tourist market in 2025. Australia received 1.04 million visitors from China that year, a 17 per cent increase year-on-year. Yet that's still below the 1.4 million recorded in 2019, before COVID.
Travel habits have changed, too. Zhang said tourists once leaned toward big group tours but now prefer "quality trips" in small groups or self-driven road trips. Figures for the Approved Destination Status (ADS) scheme reflect that shift. The bilateral agreement facilitates group tours from China to Australia through approved agencies. The program paused during COVID and resumed in 2023. More than 300,000 tourists reportedly joined an ADS group tour in the 2019 financial year. In the 2026 financial year, just 70,205 visitors travelled on ADS group trips.
The drop points to a changing business model. Operators built around large organised groups face a different market than the one they knew, while smaller outfits like Zhang's are adapting to demand for flexible, independent travel.
Why This Matters:
Tourism supports jobs across Australia, from regional operators in the Whitsundays and along the Great Ocean Road to guides and agents in capital cities. A 19 per cent jump in bookings is welcome news for those workers and small businesses. But the figures also show a partial recovery: 1.04 million visitors in 2025 against 1.4 million in 2019, and ADS group numbers far below pre-pandemic levels. Small agencies are carrying the shift toward independent travel, often without the scale of larger firms. Policymakers have a stake in how that transition plays out, since bilateral frameworks like the ADS scheme shape which businesses benefit and how evenly the gains spread across communities.