Southern Great Barrier Reef Visitors Increasing!
Posted on April 24th, 2019
TRA (Tourism Research Australia) notified Tourism and Events Queensland (TEQ) today that the National Visitor Survey (NVS) data for YE December 2018 is going to be released at 12.01am Saturday 20 April.
The NVS snapshot and Tourism Data Explorer will be updated on the TEQ website on Saturday (20 April) morning (https://teq.queensland.com/research-and-insights)
QUEENSLAND SUMMARY
Visitors: 24.1 million up 10.6%
Nights: 94.7 million up 9.5%
Expenditure: $18.3 billion up 15.6%
- Tourism Research Australia’s latest National Visitor Survey for the year ending December 2018 showed domestic overnight visitor expenditure in Queensland increased 15.6% to a record of $18.3 billion in the year ending December 2018.
- Domestic overnight visitation in Queensland grew year on year by 10.6% to a record 24.1 million and visitor nights increased to a record 94.7 million, up 9.5%.
Southern Great Barrier Reef (SGBR) – takes in the three regions of Capricorn, Gladstone and Bundaberg (Capricorn represents HALF of these stats!)
Visitors: 2.2 million up 13.6%
Nights: 8.3 million up 22.8%
Expenditure: $1.2 billion up 19.1%
- In the year ending December 2018, visitation to the SGBR region increased by 13.6% to a record high of 2.2 million visitors.
- Overnight expenditure grew by 19.1% to $1.2 billion. Visitor nights increased by 22.8% to 8.3 million.
- The biggest source of growth was the business market, which grew by 51.3% to a record 719,000 visitors.
- Holiday travel also grew, up 14.4% to 755,000 visitors, while Visiting Friends and Relatives (VFR) travel was down 8.1% to 534,000 visitors.
Capricorn Enterprise chief executive Mary Carroll said “we are thrilled with these results and so happy for our regional tourism industry and collaborative destination marketing efforts. Towards the end of last year we were receiving positive reports from our operators that the summer season was very positive and these official statistics reflect that, with a number of our operators reporting significant increases in trade from the previous year.”
“The strong growth in business visitors reflects the upturn in the region’s mining and resource sector as well as a number of major projects currently underway from highway duplication to defence contracts” she said.
“Our region has most definitely turned a corner and these results pave the way for a very exciting decade ahead which will show growth across all sectors, not just tourism.”
“I believe the strong growth in holiday travel to our destination is largely attributed to new major tourism products right across the region like the Yeppoon Lagoon, as well as the co-operative marketing efforts of our individual businesses.
“The Southern Great Barrier Reef destination is gaining huge momentum with interest not just from the domestic but the international market and as we see continued product development, tourism trade contracts and pro-active digital presence we will see continued growth” she said.
