Young travellers ditch Fiji over high costs: Report

Young travellers are turning away from Fiji because of high-cost concerns, a leading regional bank said. 

And budget-conscious young families are returning to more competitive Asian destinations, ANZ said in its Pacific Insight report. 

Visitor numbers to Cook Islands, Samoa and Vanuatu have also picked up in recent years, which suggested leisure travellers in Fiji’s main markets were looking for a better value proposition, in the face of the rising cost of living in the source countries. 

Authors of the report, ANZ’s senior Pacific economist Kishti Sen and the bank’s senior international economist Tom Kenny, said international travellers from Fiji’s source markets were returning in growing numbers to their favoured Asian destinations, such as the Philippines, Thailand, 

Vietnam and Indonesia in recent months, because Fiji was getting expensive for families travelling with children. 

Fiji needed to improve its value main markets, the bank said. 

The changing visitor demography suggested that Fiji was benefitting from multi-generational travellers that involved the middle age segment, ANZ said. 

Traditional visitor segments involved younger travellers below 49 years of age, but that had reversed, putting senior citizens at the top of the list of arrivals. 

The reversing trend emerged post-pandemic to become the highest of all age groups visiting Fiji, pushing senior travellers' segment four places up to become the leading group of international travellers to Fiji, ANZ said. 

"People in the 1–14 years and 25–49 years cohorts accounted for 61.2 per cent of all arrivals in 2019,” the bank said. 

“But that percentage has steadily dropped to 58.6 per cent in 2024 and currently stands at 57.7 per cent.” 

"It may be possible that Fiji is benefitting from multigenerational travel where senior members of the family travel with members of different generations.   

“Fiji may be wise to put in place strategies to attract more of its traditional customer base - young families - to underwrite its future tourism growth.”