The ACT economy has reaped the biggest rewards of any jurisdiction after an influx of international visitors spent a record $38.8 billion while in Australia.
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The capital received 7 per cent more international visitors than last year. And while they stayed for fewer nights, they spent $133 million more whilst in Canberra - a 28 per cent rise in expenditure.
Canberra hosted 214,000 international visitors in the year ending March 2017, compared with 200,000 the prior year.
They stayed a collective 4547 nights, down 12 per cent on 2016 figures, and spent a total of $522 million in the 12 months to March 2017.
While international visitor spending was strongest in NSW the state had a 9 per cent lift in spending by tourists.
It was Tasmania that was hot on the heels of the ACT with a 21 per cent rise in international visitor expenditure, followed by NT with a 15 per cent boost.
Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia were in line with NSW seeing just single digit increases in spending by international visitors.
Tourism Research Australia has found nationally the remarkable boost to numbers and spending were underpinned by double digit growth for visitor arrivals across eight of the top ten Asian markets: China, Japan, Malaysia, Korea, India, Indonesia, Taiwan and Thailand.
Chinese tourists injected more than $9.67 billion into the national economy during the period.
Total trip expenditure rose by 5 per cent nationally, however visitors from the Netherlands, Thailand and Taiwan really upped the ante all delivering more than a 20 per cent rise in expenditure compared with last year's numbers.
What is drawing people to Australia? It seems 14 per cent more people than last year arrived to make holidays and 12 per cent more came for education.
There was positive growth for across all visit purposes with the exception of employment which declined over the past 12 months by 2 per cent.
