Essentials this week… | Visitor arrival stats | Trade show factsheets | UK Award win | India promotion | ATE17 Seller applicatio ns open | and more…

Australia won top Australia-Pacific destination in last week’s Travelzoo Awards in London, voted for by more than 1,000 Travelzoo members. The annual awards also revealed that a beach holiday remains the preferred type of holiday among Travelzoo’s UK members. Travelzoo is a global media company which publishes offers from more than 2,000 travel and entertainment companies and has more than 28 million members in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. The UK is Australia’s third largest market for international visitors with 709,000 arrivals for the year ending August 2016. Find out more about the UK market. (Photo: SATC)

Tourism Australia has unveiled a new advertising campaign in India with attractively priced packages featuring uniquely Australian experiences. Special offers from a number of Tourism Australia’s key distribution partners in India are available at www.australia.com/offers and are being promoted online, on television and in print. The campaign will focus on Australia’s incredible aquatic and coastal experiences and use Tourism Australia’s latest ad featuring the voice of Chris Hemsworth. Partners for the campaign include Thomas Cook, SOTC, Mercury Travels, DPauls, Kulin Kumar Holidays among others. India is Australia’s ninth largest inbound visitor market by arrivals with 245,000 arrivals for the year ending August 2016, an increase of 9% over the previous year.

Seller applications are open for next year’s Australian Tourism Exchange (ATE17) to be held at the International Convention Centre Sydney from 14 to 18 May. ATE is Australia’s largest annual travel and tourism business-to-business event. It provides a forum for Australian tourism businesses to promote their products directly to tourism wholesalers and retailers from around the world through scheduled business appointments and networking events. Find out more and apply.

Tourism Australia has recently conducted new international research that examines the ‘path to purchase’ behaviour of potential international association conference delegates and reveals the best channels and messages to use in order to convince them to travel to Australia for an association event. On Tuesday 25 October Monica Armesto, Business Events Marketing and Communications Manager for Tourism Australia, will explain key findings from the research in a free 30 minute webinar.

Tourism Australia will host free-of-charge industry briefings in Hobart on Friday 4 November, Adelaide on Thursday 10 November and in Sydney on Tuesday 15 November. The briefings will involve senior executives from Tourism Australia providing an update on current and future activity and sharing research and insights from key international markets.

The Australian business events industry is being encouraged to consider exhibiting on the Australia stand at IMEX Frankfurt, held from 16 to 18 May 2017. IMEX Frankfurt is one of the key trade shows for business events and hosts buyers from the conference, convention and corporate events industries. For more information, see the IMEX Frankfurt 2016 infographic or contact [email protected]. Registrations close on Tuesday 20 December 2016.

The Asia Pacific region now has the fastest growth of new high net worth individuals in the world at around 10% per year according to a new Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report. America and Asia Pacific have approximately five million high net worth individuals each and Europe around 4.5 million. The report also outlines a number key trends defining the luxury market, including a new focus on experiential travel, a growth in mindfulness and wellbeing, and the rise of responsible travel. For more research and trends related to international and domestic tourism and travel, visit Tourism Australia’s Insight Files.