Coronavirus: Tourism plea to let holiday heavens open

Dwindling COVID cases around the country have left tourism and business leaders scratching their heads as to why borders remain closed.

‘Queensland’s a big place, there’s plenty to explore,’ says Gold Coast Paradise Resort guest Kevin Tart, with his sons Ollie and Finn. Picture: Russell Shakespeare

Every day state border restrictions remain in place, Gold Coast tourism operators lose another $10m in revenue for reasons they are now struggling to understand.

With no COVID cases in Victoria for almost two weeks and no community transmission nationwide for days, tourism industry leaders see no reason not to reopen borders. “It’s cost us a huge amount this year,” said Destination Gold Coast chairman Paul Donovan. “This whole thing has cost us $3.5bn in revenue (an estimated $10m a day), and seven million visitors. We’re really hurting and we will continue to hurt until our largest source of domestic overnight visitors, being Sydney, is opened up.”

His s call for borders to reopen was echoed around the country in the face of Victoria’s recovery from a devastating second wave.

Canberra Airport chief executive Stephen Byron said even NSW’s planned November 23 reopening to Victoria seemed too far off. “Things have gone a lot better than anyone anticipated when Premier (Gladys) Berejik­lian set that date,” he said. “It just doesn’t seem necessary to quarantine people who fly from Melbourne to Sydney any longer. ”

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews on Thursday said he “was not about lecturing other premiers” on what they should do with regard to reopening borders.

“I’ve got a very good partnership with all other first ministers, and we’ve seen announcements in recent times about NSW, we’ve seen some foreshadowing from the chief health officer up in Queensland, the Premier of Tasmania has made some positive announcements very recently,” he said. “The goal’s always been (to) get to the end of the year and have the country as one unified country, where we don’t have these borders … I think we’re well and truly on track for that..”

Ai Group Victorian head Tim Piper said industry was “very keen” to see borders reopen, describing it as the “most common issue” raised with him by business leaders: “The sooner that happens, the happier we’ll be, particularly with Victoria seemingly in a better position than NSW.”

Modelling by Tourism Research Australia estimated the impact of COVID on the domestic visitor economy at $31.2bn for the year to date, with airlines operating at a fraction of capacity for most of 2020.

Australian Tourism Industry Council executive director Simon Westaway said there was a light at the end of the tunnel but “the sooner borders reopened the greater the benefit to businesses”.

With Sydney and Melbourne providing two-thirds of bookings for Paradise Resort at Surfers Paradise, sales and marketing manager Alicia Szerzyn was anxiously awaiting an update on state borders. “Our concern is if people are getting nervous about whether borders will be open, they will just simply cancel and that would be disastrous,”she said.

Resort guest Kevin Tart was less bothered about borders as he enjoyed a family holiday on the Gold Coast: “Queensland’s a big place, there’s plenty to explore.”

Additional reporting: Jared Lynch, Paul Garvey