Brisbane Airport has another record year

By Mozo · · 2 min read
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More than 21 million international and domestic passengers passed through Brisbane Airport in the last 12 months.

Bosses have revealed that the airport enjoyed another record-breaking year in terms of visitor numbers between July 2011 and June 2012.

This represented year-on-year growth of 4.6 per cent – the equivalent of 910,000 extra people.

A lot of Australians have been encouraged to head abroad because of the strength of the dollar, which has ensured they have been benefiting from the best exchange rates seen for a long time.

The currency gained even more ground on the US dollar last week and also reached record levels against the euro, so there is every chance that Brisbane Airport will see its passenger traffic grow further still in the coming weeks.

"You can never accurately predict what the future will bring and this year was no exception with both global and local events impacting travel trends," commented Brisbane Airport Corporation chief executive officer and managing director Julieanne Alroe.

“Factors such as the Rugby World Cup, the strong Aussie dollar, the addition of new routes and increased capacity to cater for the fly-in-fly-out market helped us achieve a strong result," she added.

However, the airport chief believes that passenger numbers could have been even higher but for a number of natural disasters that blighted Australia.

Aussie passport holders were the main contributors to the upturn, but inbound foreigners also helped to swell the numbers.

China has long been a huge market for the Australian tourism sector and holidaymakers from the Asian country tend to spend huge amounts of overseas travel money when they head down under.

Around 179,000 Chinese people visited Australia during the 12-month period, which was a rise of 24 per cent on the previous year. Meanwhile, 903,000 New Zealanders made the short hop over to Australia – an increase of 3.5 per cent – and 71,600 Indians also travelled to the country, which represented annual growth of ten per cent.