Revealed: where Tassie is holidaying now
New data reveals the first green shoots of recovery for Tasmania’s tourism industry – and the parts of the state we’re heading to for a little bit of down time.
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The first green shoots of the tourism industry are appearing, with solid growth in holiday traffic recorded in both the state’s north and south, new data shows.
A new Road Trip Index generated by data from travellers using TripTech apps shows leisure traffic around Hobart and the south (including Port Arthur) has been growing at four per cent each week through June and July. A similar rate of growth has been recorded around Launceston and the Tamar over the past four weeks.
The data comes from a suite of 14 TripTech apps produced for car hire companies, accommodation providers and RV hire companies and includes CamperMate, which has over two million downloads.
“Even at this early stage of what will be a long road back to recovery, our launched Independent Road Travel Index is showing a clear and sustainable increase in the number of Australians who are returning to travel and they’re almost exclusively doing so by road,” said TripTech CEO Nick Baker.
“The road trip is not just back in vogue, but it could be here to stay and become entrenched as the primary and most popular means of tourist and leisure travel within and across Australia.”
Caravan Industry Association CEO Stuart Lamont said there had been a “resurgence of activity towards caravanning and camping roadtrips” in Tasmania since mid-May, with increases in park occupancy, as well as more enquiries at dealerships.
Cabins had 55 per cent occupancy during the week commencing July 6, while powered sites were at 25 per cent occupancy.
Australian Tourism Industry Council executive director Simon Westaway told News Corp that of all the states, Tasmania was “the most reliant state on interstate travel”.
“These figures will move once we see some interstate travellers come back into the market,” he said.
Although talk had raced ahead to discussion of trans-Tasman bubbles, Mr Westaway said the reality was that intrastate and some interstate travel was all that was available right now.
“It’s human nature to be optimistic, but some of the optimism around the reopening of the travel market, both domestically and internationally, has needed to be parked, and we need to be a bit more realistic about where things are at,” he said.
The national data shows that Queenslanders have taken to the road trip holiday with particular gusto: seven of the top 10 holiday traffic growth areas in the country are in the Sunshine State.
But the data also shows how badly Australia’s tourism regions have been hit, with holiday traffic to the Gold Coast down 50 per cent on the same time last year, and the Flinders Ranges in South Australia down 52.8 per cent.
Originally published as Revealed: where Tassie is holidaying now