Australia ranked among the most sought-after destinations for Chinese travellers during China’s Golden Week holiday. International Air Transport Association data showed flight bookings from China to Australia in October 2026 rose 19 per cent compared with October 2025. Holiday travel between the countries has increased, but visitor totals remain below their pre-COVID level.
Trip.com said Chinese travellers booked “longer and further trips beyond the region” this year. Bookings rose as the Mid-Autumn Festival public holiday coincided with Golden Week, giving people 13 days off. China’s official immigration data recorded more than 2.2 million inbound and outbound passengers during the Mid-Autumn Festival, up 16.8 per cent compared with the same holiday last year.
Tourist Numbers and Local Experiences
Fei Chang and her husband travelled to Australia during the holiday, where they encountered Chinese tourists at destinations 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, another example of the destinations Chinese visitors chose on their trip.
Zhang Cheng, a Melbourne travel agent and owner of Great Wall Travel Services, said her agency had received a surge in bookings. Her agency primarily takes bookings from Chinese-speaking tourists, but Zhang said she wasn’t sure how many visitors came from overseas and how many belonged to Australia’s Chinese-speaking community. So the agency’s bookings don’t give a precise count of international arrivals.
“We are fully booked with two-day tours to the Great Ocean Road,” Zhang said. She was also taking a group of Chinese-speaking tourists to Canberra for one of the Southern Hemisphere’s biggest horticultural shows. The bookings point to demand for organized excursions to Australian destinations, including the Great Ocean Road and the national capital.
The Bilateral Tour Scheme
Some Chinese guided-tour groups travel under the Approved Destination Status scheme, a bilateral agreement that facilitates group tours from China to Australia through approved agencies. The program paused during COVID and resumed in 2023. Its figures offer a measure of one formal channel for group tourism between the countries.
More than 300,000 tourists reportedly joined an Approved Destination Status group tour in the 2019 financial year. In the 2026 financial year, 70,205 visitors took those trips. Zhang said travellers had tended to take big group tours before the pandemic, but now preferred “quality trips” in small groups or road trips by themselves.
Tourism Research Australia identified China as Australia’s second-largest inbound tourist market in 2025. Australia received 1.04 million visitors from China that year, a 17 per cent year-on-year increase. That total remained below the 1.4 million visitors recorded in 2019, before COVID. Travel demand has returned, though arrivals remain below the earlier peak.