Sydney draining the hip pockets of tourists

Sitting by the Railway Square YHA pool, all three backpacking experts have something to say about the state of tourism in Sydney. And with the Australian currency at its highest point in years, the city doesn’t come cheap. Why?

Silke Kerwick is Communications Manager at the hostelling association YHA Australia, and talks trends in the industry while leading a tour of train carriage-style dorms at the YHA building in Railway Square.

“You’ll see the traditional markets are plateauing or declining and there are new markets emerging,” Silke says. “The Asian economies are booming, so a lot more visitors are coming from China, Taiwan, Korea and Hong Kong. That’s what we’ve seen this year particularly.”

Your average backpacker carries less baggage, stays longer and strays further than your regular tourist, and Silke Kerwick has seen plenty of them.

But they are more likely to be hit by the high cost of living in Sydney. So what happens next? Adapt.

“With backpackers, they tend to get off the beaten track more – they’ll go to regional areas, they’ll stay longer, they’ll spend longer in that community while they’re there,” Silke says.

“They might share costs – catering, self-catering hostels, transport, they might pool together and get a campervan or hire a car. They’re pretty savvy with ways to maximise their money.”

Australia’s system of working holiday visa scheme is proving increasingly popular, and 185,480 working holiday visas were issued from 2010 to 2011. It’s reciprocal with many other countries, and you must be under 26 to qualify.

It offers backpackers the opportunity to stay for up to one year and work while they do, and Swedish backpacker Anton Carlsson was one inbound international to successfully take it up.

Anton is just one of 565,000 backpackers to arrive in Australia last year, and to keep costs low he timed his trip to coincide with his parents’ work placement in Sydney.

A parent-supported base in the city has been a useful advantage for Anton, who has used it as a springboard for trips to iconic attractions, including the Great Barrier Reef and Uluru.

“For me it’s really exotic to see all the dust and nothing else – all flat,” he says. “Basically one big red stone in the middle – the awesome nature you have here, all the birds, kangaroos and so on. So for me it’s really fascinating to see just typical things.”

The opportunity to work and enjoy relatively high Australian wages helps balance out Sydney’s expensive groceries – especially apples and tomatoes. Credit due to his visa, Anton says.

“It’s been really good – I’ve been working two months as a removalist and I was working on a farm for about a month before that,” he says. “It was a horse farm, so I basically got up in the morning and took care of the horses … I did some construction work on the farm property – whatever needed to be done.”

Another Swedish backpacker on a working holiday visa is Madeleine Norberg, who is on her second tour of Australia after coming here for the first time in 2011.

So how does she like to travel? “I don’t really have a plan,” she says. “I do everything very spontaneously. So I just made my mind – up, up and away.”

Like many backpackers, Madeleine found it easier to find employment in regional areas, and she has recently returned from several months working in the Queensland mining town of Condamine.

And from her experience, the hustle and bustle of Sydney makes for expensive city living.

“It’s not like in the outback, because everything is very cheap there,” she says.

Asked how to keep costs down in Sydney, Madeleine says: “We usually eat noodles because it’s cheap. We eat very cheap food like Weetbix. And we do our laundry in the sink.”

Making the working holiday visa even more alluring is the ability to reapply for a second time after doing specified work in a regional area.

“It works very well, because I have the opportunity to stay here another year if I work 88 days on a farm, so that’s a good thing,” Madeleine says.

The high dollar may be good for Australians travelling overseas, but it’s slowing inbound tourism dramatically as visitors lose their spending power and trip durations shorten.

But Australia still attracts tourists, says Silke. “Backpacker numbers continue to rise slightly,” she says. “We’re not seeing the huge growth there was in the previous decade, but they’re still coming.”

And backpackers are a resourceful lot. Anton has been in Australia nearly a year now. He says: “I did that. I survived. All the prices.”