By Richa Sharma
New Delhi, Feb 12 (IANS) Despite the negative image of Australia in Indian minds at the moment, the country is seeking more tourists from India, building on the 11.9 percent jump in tourist inflow last year.

“India is very important to Australia as a tourism opportunity. It’s the tenth largest economy and has the second largest population in the world. India is going to go through a significant period of growth which is going to create opportunities for people to rationally think about travel,” Australian Tourism Minister Martin Ferguson told IANS in an interview here.

Ferguson said that Australia got good growth out of India last year despite the global financial crisis and the prediction by the World Tourism Organisation that travel would decline by 4 to 4.5 percent.

“About 120,500 Indians visited Australia in 2008-09, an increase of 11.9 percent on 2007-08. As many as 136,200 Australians visited India, an increase of 5.7 percent during the same period. It’s a two-way tourism opportunity for the benefit of both the countries,” said the minister.

According to Ferguson, Australia is emerging as an aspirational destination compared to places like Britain and North America and Indians are getting attracted to it because of the wide range of adventure activities it offers.

“We get people who are described as high yield, who come for about a fortnight, stay in better class hotels, get to two-three destination in cities like Sydney and look for scintillating adventures — something that is different,” he said.

In order to attract a large number of tourists from India, Australia is planning to launch tourism campaign with airlines companies such as Qantas and Singapore Airlines in the next two months.

“We have a full-time tourism office in Mumbai. They are also doing strategic marketing packages for the last four months with Singapore Airlines and Qantas, trying to offer competitive prices for travel to Australia.

“The Tourism Australia website is getting more attractive as more and more people are actually researching about their trip by going on the Internet rather than going to travel agents,” he said.

The minister said the attacks on Indian students in the past nine months have not affected the tourist inflow to Australia as they do not visit suburbs where these incidents had occurred.

“The acts of criminality had occurred in suburbs that tourists don’t visit. They concentrate in the central business area. They stay at leading hotels, eat at city restaurants.

“I think from my tourist point of view one good thing is that they don’t go to difficult suburbs. In every city there are areas which you must be vigilant about, especially in early hours of morning or late at night,” Ferguson said.

(Richa Sharma can be contacted at richa.s@ians.in)