As part of an ongoing commitment to the Chinese business events market Tourism Australia has appointed two senior executives who will be responsible for developing its operations in the Greater China region.

Eva Huang has been appointed to the newly created role of regional manager, Greater China. With 17 years of marketing and strategy development experience gained in the UK, North America and China, she will be responsible for strategy development and the leadership of Tourism Australia’s Greater China team.

In a second new role, Ms LC Tan has been appointed as business events manager for Greater China. The role has been established in response to the Chinese market’s growing enthusiasm for business and incentive events in Australia.

The new appointments are part of the Australian government’s Tourism 2020 strategy aimed at doubling the overnight expenditure generated by tourism to as much as $140 billion by the year 2020. For business events, this means an increase in the amount of overnight expenditure by visiting delegates to AUD $16bn by 2020.

China is the fastest growing market for business events arrivals into Australia and is currently Australia’s third biggest market for business arrivals. In the year ended 31 December 2011 there were 72,000 business events arrivals into Australia, an increase of 26% year on year. Convention and conference arrivals from China were also strong in the same period, increasing by 11% to 13,000 arrivals.

China’s growing economy offers great opportunity for the incentive and business events sector in Australia said Penny Lion, Head of Business Events at Tourism Australia.

“The Chinese market presents exciting opportunities and the new appointments will allow us to develop a greater understanding of the unique requirements of the market. These insights will allow us to fully support the Australian business events and incentives industry by sharing our knowledge of the operational needs this important market has,” Lion said.

In addition to an ongoing series of trade events and roadshows across Greater China, Tourism Australia has created an integrated business events advertising campaign that will be translated into Simplified Chinese and published in key Chinese publications and websites.

Tourism Australia also recently launched a new website for event planners, www.businessevents.australia.com, which will be translated into Mandarin later this year.