Destinations known | Will carbon cost of flights to Australasia put off long-haul tourists? Is Great Barrier Reef bleaching a turn-off too?
- Everything in aviation seems stacked against Australia and New Zealand, starting with firms wary of blowing their carbon targets by sending people Down Under
- Post-pandemic capacity issues pushed up airfares, and they will rise more to pay for sustainable airline fuel – of which there is unlikely ever to be enough
How far is too far? That is the question that will be increasingly asked by prospective visitors to the Antipodes.
Even now, “Australia is losing its appeal as a destination for international business events […] because of the carbon that’s emitted flying there,” reported Bloomberg recently.
And some tourists will no doubt feel the same about trekking to the Land Down Under, as well as, by extension, The Land of the Long White Cloud (New Zealand, if you were wondering).
“Many businesses don’t want to take part in a conference that is going to damage their own carbon targets, nor do they want to send a whole lot of delegates to a conference that far away,” Bloomberg quoted Margy Osmond, chief executive of the Tourism & Transport Forum Australia, as saying.
“So we are already seeing really significant impacts on our attractiveness as a business events destination.”
Osmond also told Bloomberg that visits from the likes of Taylor Swift, who performed in Melbourne and Sydney last month, would become rarer as superstars balked at the carbon investment necessary to fly all the way to Australia.
