International Air Transport Association data show flight bookings from China to Australia for October 2026 are up 19 per cent on the same month last year. Chinese travellers used the week-long Golden Week holiday to book “longer and further trips beyond the region,” Trip.com said.
The figures point to a tourism trade recovering through consumer choice, not government programming. But the sector still has a long way to go.
A Holiday Boom
China’s national holiday ran from October 1 to 7. The three-day Mid-Autumn Festival public holiday came at the same time, giving workers 13 days off. China’s official immigration data showed more than 2.2 million inbound and outbound passengers travelled during the Mid-Autumn Festival, up 16.8 per cent on the same holiday last year.
Trip.com said Australia ranked among the most sought-after destinations.
Fei Chang and her husband spent the holiday in Australia. They were struck by how many fellow Chinese travellers they met in the Whitsundays. “At some tourist spots, it felt like I could almost speak Mandarin to everyone,” Chang said. The couple also visited beaches in Sydney.
Small Operators Feel the Surge
For small businesses, the rush has been tangible. Melbourne travel agent Zhang Cheng, who owns Great Wall Travel Services, said she’d received a surge in 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 mainly serves Chinese-speaking tourists, though she said she wasn’t sure how many visitors came from overseas and how many belonged to Australia’s own Chinese-speaking community.
Tastes have shifted, too. Before the pandemic, travellers tended to take big group tours. Now they prefer what Zhang called “quality trips” in small groups, or road trips by themselves. It’s a market responding to customer demand, not waiting for policy directions.
The Group Tour Scheme Lags
The structured side of the trade tells a different story. Chinese guided-tour groups sometimes operate under the Approved Destination Status (ADS) scheme, a bilateral agreement that facilitates group tours from China to Australia through approved agencies. COVID paused the program, which resumed in 2023.
The recovery there has been far weaker. More than 300,000 tourists reportedly joined an ADS group tour in the 2019 financial year. In the 2026 financial year, that figure fell to 70,205. That’s a drop of roughly three-quarters.
The broader picture looks better, but remains incomplete. 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 remains below the 1.4 million recorded in 2019, before COVID.
Why This Matters:
The Golden Week numbers are good news for Australian tourism operators, but they come with a caution. Independent travellers and small-group bookings are driving growth, while the government-brokered ADS channel has shrunk dramatically from its 2019 level. That suggests individual consumer choice, not bilateral arrangements, is doing the heavy lifting. There’s also a risk in relying on one market: a single foreign source supplies over a million visitors a year, and total arrivals still trail pre-pandemic levels. Operators like Zhang’s are cashing in, but a sector built on discretionary spending abroad can shift quickly. Businesses that adapt to what travellers actually want, as these agents have, look best placed to hold the gains.