Backpacker status on rise to ‘international student travellers’
THE term “backpacker” is outdated and should be changed to tap into the international student tourism market, a tourist operator said at a Darwin conference.
More than half a million students travel to Australia each year, bringing in around $15.5 billion annually.
Brett Eldershaw, director of tour group Colourful Trips Australia, said the students are an untapped tourism market.
He wants a debate about the word backpacker, which he says excludes international students from taking part and sourcing low-cost travel.
“They don’t call themselves backpackers, they don’t know what a backpacker is or what a backpacker hostel is, they call themselves international students,” he told a conference in Darwin.
“To embrace this market … you need to move the backpacker terminology to one side. You need to come up with another word that is all-encompassing … something like youth and student travel.”
But the Backpacker Tourism Advisory Panel (BTAP) disagrees.
Panel chairman Peter Burke said the only similarity between backpackers and international students is their age.
“There’s a lot of these guys (international students) but I just don’t see them as the same market,” he told the conference. “Most of them are here to study, that’s it.”
He said Asian students, who represent 70 per cent of foreign students, have no budget to travel.
“If they do have any extra (money) they send it back home.”
