It caps off a heady period for tourism which cracked records for holiday spending over the year to June 30.

Tourism Queensland chair Leanne Coddington said the year produced “fantastic domestic stats” which showed almost $20 billion was spent on Queensland tourism for the June 30 year.

Domestic travel through Brisbane Airport was back to its pre-pandemic levels and about 1 million passed through its terminal over the school holidays.

However, Coddington said international tourism was a different story.

“Looking at international it’s a slow recovery, which we knew it would be, looking through to 2025 is when we anticipate international to be back,” she said.

“But there was fantastic news this week with Hong Kong and Japan reducing some, or most of their restrictions, on international travel which is fantastic news for us, knowing that those two markets are key for us, particularly Japan where we currently have a delegation reconnecting.”

However, Brisbane Airport said it anticipated a post-pandemic record would be set in the international terminal this weekend with daily traveller numbers tipped to exceed 13,000 a day. Pre-pandemic it was about 20,000 and during the worst of Covid international travel hit zero.

International capacity was slowly coming back. United Airlines would commence a direct Brisbane to San Francisco flight next month and Qantas was expected to double the number of services between Brisbane and Auckland to twice daily.

Virgin was also scheduling a Brisbane to Queenstown service from November.

Austrade said about 686,000 international visitors came to Australia in the June quarter as India moved into the top five markets for the first time.

Tourism and Events Queensland would also launch the next phase of its Seize the Days campaign on October 9.

Since launching on 28 August, the campaign has generated more than eight million impressions on social media.