Australia Reopens to International Travelers

Moments after the Australian government announced that it would reopen the country’s borders to international travelers later this month, Emily Barrett locked in a fare for a flight to Sydney. The 32-year-old nanny from Palo Alto, Calif., spent three days researching and talking to Australian friends before she decided to book her trip to the island continent, which for two years had some of the world’s strictest border controls and longest lockdowns aimed at controlling the spread of the coronavirus.

“They all said, ‘if we go back into a lockdown now, people will go into the streets,’” she said. Her two-week trip is scheduled to start a few days after the border opens on Feb. 21.

Potential travelers and tourism operators alike are cautiously optimistic about the reopening of “Fortress Australia,” but many wonder if the isolated nation’s ongoing Covid restrictions — such as vaccine and testing requirements, as well as mask mandates — will make the return of international travel more of a trickle than a splash. Australia’s reputation for rigidity and reclusiveness during the pandemic — at odds with the inviting, easygoing nature portrayed by the country’s tourism boards — may also be a hurdle to overcome.

“There is no doubt that a full recovery will take time, but we are confident that the demand for Australia is strong,” said Phillipa Harrison, the managing director of Tourism Australia, the country’s tourism board.

Tourism was one of the fastest growing sectors in Australia’s economy before the pandemic, contributing 45 billion Australian dollars in 2019, or $32 billion.

Australia is among the world’s most immunized countries for Covid-19, with 94 percent of people over 16 fully vaccinated. Through 2020 and 2021, the country pursued a tough “zero Covid” strategy that closed national and state borders; restricted Australians from returning home and even leaving; enforced monthslong lockdowns and required its few visitors to undergo expensive hotel quarantines. Surging cases of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus in January, which persist, but have since declined, tipped most of the country into a new ‘living with the virus’ phase.

“It’s about coming back so the virus is under our control, whereas we felt that the virus was controlling us,” said Catherine Bennett, an epidemiologist at Deakin University in Melbourne, adding that opening the borders represented a turning point. “This is saying: We’re ready for this.”

Australia’s walls come down

Australia’s grand reopening comes with a few ground rules. Travelers entering the country must be fully vaccinated to avoid a costly two-week hotel quarantine, and must test before arrival — somewhat common requirements for travel now.

But it will take a little more time for Australia’s welcome mat to roll out all the way. The entire state of Western Australia — a third of Australia’s vast land mass, but home to just 10 percent of the population — has essentially been closed to both international travelers and even vaccinated Australian citizens for most of the pandemic. It plans to reopen to vaccinated travelers on March 3, with testing rules on arrival. The state, which has reported about 2,900 total cases and 10 deaths since the pandemic began, is home to Perth — one of the world’s most remote major cities — more than 7,000 miles of coastline, the Kimberley region’s dramatic sandstone gorges and wine destinations like Margaret River. While the federal government can open the nation’s borders, the states can still set their own Covid restrictions, including entry rules.

“We desperately want people to come back,” said Graeme Skeggs, a general manager at Adam’s Pinnacle Tours, one of Western Australia’s larger tour companies, which, until the pandemic, operated luxury tours of the state’s renowned coastlines and landscapes. Much of their business evaporated after Covid struck, and some smaller operators the company worked with have closed. “Two years is a lot longer than any of us thought,” Mr. Skeggs said.

While many operators who rely on foreign tourists are hopeful, it’s clear that there is no simple return to prepandemic times.

China overtook New Zealand as Australia’s largest foreign tourist market for the first time in 2017, and 1.3 million visitors from mainland China spent more than $12 billion Australian dollars, or nearly $9 billion, in 2019, about 27 percent of the year’s international visitor spend.

With China still severely limiting outbound travel, that leaves a gaping hole in Australia’s tourism economy.

Michelle Chen opened the Apollo Surfcoast Chinese Restaurant in 2012 along Victoria’s Great Ocean Road — one of the state’s major scenic attractions, about a 2.5-hour drive from Melbourne — to cater to the hundreds of Chinese day-trippers who would stream off buses each day on their way to view the Twelve Apostles, a limestone rock…