Aussie hotels to serve curry for breakfast

Exotic offerings are to join the breakfast buffet staples

In a bid to cater for growing numbers of Indian and Chinese guests, Australian hotel chains are starting to offer more diverse breakfast buffets as part of their package.

In addition to traditional breakfast staples such as sausage, bacon, toast, egg, fruit, croissants and the like, dishes such as dahl, chapati, rice soup and noodles are likely to appear so that Asian visitors to Australia don’t feel alienated.

The Accor group of hotels, which includes Novotel and Mercure, is the first to introduce a program catering specifically to visitors from China and India. As well as breakfast buffets, they have recruited Chinese and Hindi-speaking staff into their hotels, and Chinese and Indian TV channels into their entertainment menu.

Australia’s Tourism Forecasting Committee predicts that Chinese holidaymakers will be the second-largest market for Australian Tourism by 2018, after New Zealand. Inbound travel from India is set to double by 2020, increasing about 10 percent a year.

These figures reflect the growth of personal wealth in Asia’s industrial powerhouses, and the accompanying urge to travel among their populations. China and India are both very large and diverse places, with ancient and ingrained cultures,  so mass-market overseas tourism is a relatively new trend.

Newbie Asian tourists can traditionally be a little apprehensive about the brash and incomprehensible Western world, so Australia’s hotels have recognised the need to provide as much familiarity to them as possible.

International tourism is booming in Australia – unaffected by recent floods and storms – but domestic tourism is starting to level off, so if tourism spending is to grow overall, the focus will need to switch to overseas visitors.

Overall growth means that demand for rooms and staff is growing – by 2020, the industry will need 50,000 extra hotel rooms and 100,000 new tourism jobs.

In a country with such low unemployment, this could have an effect on the Migration Skills list – so anyone hoping to migrate to Australia who has good hospitality experience, watch this space!

Meanwhile, we can all take advantage of the expanded breakfast menu… Dahl on toast is something we can happily get used to.

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