International passengers at Melbourne Airport continued to grow strongly, increasing by 5.8 per cent or an additional 36,556 passengers compared to January 2011 and taking total international passengers to 667,535 for the month.

Melbourne Airport CEO, Mr Chris Woodruff said that international growth in January had been driven by Chinese New Year celebrations.

“Chinese New Year is a significant celebration and people made the most of the holiday with passport holders from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan all increasing by more than 20 per cent.”

“As well as embracing significant cultural events, Melbourne continues to serve up great reasons to visit our city and state with fantastic major events such as the recent Australian Tennis Open and the upcoming Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix.”

“The latest International Visitor Survey figures show that foreign visitors are increasingly spending time in Victoria.  This figure is increasing almost four times more than change in visitors to New South Wales and Queensland combined.  It’s clear that Victoria is a popular place to visit,” said Mr Woodruff.

“Also significantly influencing domestic travel over the last decade has been the emergence and enormous growth of the low-cost carrier market.  We believe the strong growth in this market will continue and our new domestic terminal is aimed at catering for this growth.” 

“The new terminal will be located adjacent to the current terminal precinct and we’ll be releasing more details on this project shortly.”

Domestic passengers declined by less than one per cent compared to the same period last year, resulting in a total of 1,827,900 domestic passengers.  Passengers for January increased by 21,205 or 0.9 per cent compared to the same period last year, taking total passengers for January to 2,495,435.