The latest International and National Visitor Survey shows, Australia welcomed 8.4 million visitors in the 12 months from September 20-17.
1.3 million came from China alone – an increase of 8 per cent.
It’s the biggest market, with Chinese visitors spending more than 11.5 billion dollars.
But India shows the strongest growth - with visitor numbers increased by 20 per cent to more than 324-thousand.
Sydney tour guide Sharon Yang says many tour companies have expanded to meet the demand.
"Especially this year, many Chinese come here, Sydney is the most popular city in Chinese people mind. We love here very much because it's a prosperous city and moreover, it's very clean and people here are very friendly"
But it's also the place to be for Indian tourists.
Chief executive Margy Osmond from the Australian Tourism and Transport Forum says it's fortunate that Australians like to play cricket.
"The Indian interest in Australia is being grown massively from the middle cast in India, which is exactly that same was we saw in China, and of course it doesn't hurt that we like to play cricket together. The bottom line is that the captain of the Indian cricket team has been talking Australia up a storm on his Instagram account and that's really abodes really well for the future of Indian tourism in Australia"
The data also shows our capital cities are no longer stealing the spotlight.
More than 2 million international travellers chose to travel regionally.
Even Australians are exploring more of their own backyard, with domestic spending in the regions up by 10 per cent.
This young mum from the Gold Coast, is visiting Sydney with her family.
"I really want to go to Uluru and driving here was on the bucket list too. We've been to Melbourne before but we'd like to go back to Melbourne so yeah we decided we wanted to explore more of Australia than leaving the country"
Tourism Minister Simon Burmingham says he's planning to announce 40 million dollars of additional funding over the next few months for regional tourism.
"Pleasingly we're seeing increased investment in accommodation and attraction across regional Australia and that really bodes well with encouraging tourists to come back a second or third stay, having visited a capital city, they can choose to come back and get out into the regions, have new different experiences, and it's those second third time visitors that really generate the lift in spending across the tourism sector"
Tourism Australia has been pushing the move, with eighty per cent of campaigns showcasing experiences outside of capital cities.
