Flight bookings from China to Australia rose 19 per cent in October 2026 compared with October 2025. At one Melbourne travel agency, bookings surged during China's national holiday. Chinese travellers, meanwhile, shifted away from large guided groups toward smaller tours and self-directed road trips.
Demand and the tour business
Zhang Cheng, a Melbourne travel agent and owner of Great Wall Travel Services, said her agency had received a surge in bookings over the past week. “We are fully booked with two-day tours to the Great Ocean Road,” she said. The agency primarily takes bookings from Chinese-speaking tourists, but Zhang wasn't sure how many visitors came from overseas and how many belonged to Australia's Chinese-speaking community.
That week, Zhang was taking a group of Chinese-speaking tourists to Canberra for one of the Southern Hemisphere's biggest horticultural shows. Her account covers bookings for specific tours, while the travel data captures a broader rise in flights between China and Australia.
Trip.com said Australia ranked among the most sought-after destinations for Chinese travellers during the week-long national holiday, which ran from October 1 to 7. The company said travellers booked “longer and further trips beyond the region” this year. International Air Transport Association data showed flight bookings from China to Australia for October 2026 had risen 19 per cent from October 2025.
Fei Chang and her husband visited the Whitsundays and beaches in Sydney during the holiday. They were surprised by the number of Chinese tourists they encountered in the Whitsundays. “At some tourist spots, it felt like I could almost speak Mandarin to everyone,” Chang said.
A different group-tour pattern
Before the pandemic, Chinese travellers tended to take big group tours, Zhang said. Now they prefer “quality trips” in small groups or road trips by themselves. At the same time, visitor numbers under the Approved Destination Status scheme, known as ADS, have fallen sharply.
The bilateral ADS agreement facilitates group tours from China to Australia through approved agencies. COVID paused the program; it resumed in 2023. More than 300,000 tourists reportedly joined an ADS group tour in the 2019 financial year. In the 2026 financial year, 70,205 visitors took ADS group trips.
The figures measure different things. Airline bookings rose, but participation in the approved group-tour scheme remained far below the total reported for the 2019 financial year. Zhang described small-group and independent travel as preferences among the travellers her agency serves, but she doesn't provide a breakdown of bookings by tour type.
Holiday traffic and market totals
The three-day 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, up 16.8 per cent compared with the same holiday last year.
Tourism Research Australia named China Australia's second-largest inbound tourist market in 2025. Australia received 1.04 million visitors from China that year, 17 per cent more than the year before. That total was still below the 1.4 million visitors recorded in 2019, before COVID.
The published figures track passenger movements, visitor totals, flight bookings and agency tours. They don't report tour-company revenue, workers' pay or the share of tourism spending retained by businesses.