Chanting fills the air and the screen reveals snow-capped mountains, waterfalls, sparkling bays and golden architecture.

Camels step through vast deserts, beautiful women dance and richly adorned elephants parade. Then the magnificent Taj Mahal comes into shot and we are invited to "experience India".

The promotional video for Indian tourism has just been shown to 600 tourism providers gathered at an industry conference in Newcastle, New South Wales, to discuss the future of Australia's lucrative but stagnating tourism industry.

China, India, South East Asia and the booming Arab states are getting serious about tourism and Australia better be ready, the Pacific Asia Travel Association's (PATA) Chris Flynn announces.

The statistics speak for themselves.

Currently there are 155,000 hotels, or 366,679 rooms in the construction pipeline in Asia, funded by investors who were guaranteed a quicker return than Australia could offer, Mr Flynn later told AAP.

In Australia there are just 2,676 rooms being built.

South East Asian aviation is booming and the region is doing well out of its cultural tourism drawcard.

Tourists to South East Asia grew by 11 per cent last year. Australia's international tourists grew by two per cent.

"What it means for us in Australia is that we're going to have even more competition on our doorstep," Mr Flynn said.

"So as we're seeing in certain part of Asia the emergence of new resorts, new hotels, new destinations, new opportunities for other governments to promote tourism and also greater access, it paints a pretty dim picture for us down here."

He said the trend could see Australia further isolated if it did not tap into the massive potential the region offered.

"Asia right now, which is right on our doorstop, is creating millions of new travellers," he said.

"Now do we want a piece of that action, or are we going to just go with the same old market?"

It's a sobering reality for Australian tourism, which is fighting to grow its $85A billion ($80US billion) a year tourism market in the face of fierce international competition, labour shortages and a strong Aussie dollar.

According to grim figures, Australia will soon become a net importer of tourism with Australians holidaying abroad last year spending $22A billion - only marginally less than the $22A.4 billion spent by visitors to Australia.

"The export tourism industry is at a real crossroads at the moment," according to Australian Tourism Export Council (ATEC) managing director Matt Hingerty.

"We have significant global pressures on our performance, the first one being enormous competition primarily from planned economies back by massive sovereign wealth funds.

"It's made the world a very competitive place. At the same time, our dollar's going up, which is making us more expensive as a destination and of course it's fuelling outbound growth from Australia."

Mr Hingerty said this was all occurring while costs to businesses - labour, fuel, construction costs and food and beverage - were increasing.

"So we can sit back and whinge about it, we can keep trying to do things the way we've always done, or we can innovate, and that is two-fold," he said.

Firstly, Australia had to maintain strong markets from New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany and China while growing the emerging markets of South America, Vietnam, India and eastern Europe.

Australia also had to develop new products to offer the world beyond Sydney, Melbourne, the Gold Coast and the Great Barrier Reef.

"But Australia is in a lucky position that, although we've got our tried and true products, we still have a lot of destinations that really haven't been featured on the global supermarket shelf," Mr Hingerty said.

"Places like Margaret River, south-west and western Australia, and northern Australia. If you draw a line from Cairns across to Broome we've got this incredible natural product with the indigenous factor there as well."

But as well as featuring new places, Mr Hingerty said Australia needed to market different experiences and meet growing trends, such as health and eco-tourism, spurred on by cashed-up baby boomers reaching retirement age in the next decade.

The industry also had to recapture its entrepreneurial skills and innovate together, rather than rely on government bodies such as Tourism Australia to do all the hard work, he said.

It's a position federal Tourism Minister Martin Ferguson agrees with, this week announcing an independent "steering body" to spearhead a long-term national tourism strategy.

"It's about your industry taking hold and ownership of your future ... because any industry's success should not rely on the whim of a minister or a government of any political persuasion," Mr Ferguson told a Tourism and Transport Forum (TTF) summit this week.

"The undertaking I give you is to work with you ... to help the tourism industry realise its full potential."

The hope is that the government and industry can work together to translate tourists' intentions to holiday Down Under into ticket sales before they are lured elsewhere.

(AAP)