Day trippers up - overnighters down

Tourism Research Australia and Destination NSW have released visitor travel data for the year ended December 2018 for all regions across Australia and they make interesting reading for the Central Coast's tourism industry.

The past five years has seen the number of day trippers increase by 21% with 2018 showing an increase of 8.7% over 2017.

The number of domestic day trips to regional NSW increased by 4.5% on 2017 and by 17.3% compared to four years ago.

In terms of Overnight Domestic Travel the Central Coast received 1.382 million visitors down from 1.438 million in 2017 or 6.8% on 2017.

Of this number an average of 42% come to the Coast to visit friends and relatives. In other words almost half of would have come to the region anyway.

Meanwhile the most valuable visitors to the region are those stay overnight and longer. In 2018

While Domestic Visitors fell back compared with 2018, visitor numbers in the region have obviously plateaued.

In fact over the past ten years the number has only increased by 170,000 visitors or 14%.

When compared with competing regions over the past two years the Central Coast has not done that well:

International Overnight Travel

This market segment reveals that Central Coast received 68,800 international overnight visitors in 2018 which translated into 851,000 visitor nights. It also reveals that in spite of the Central Coast being so close to Sydney no effort is put into attracting this high yield market.

The Table below highlights the unpredictability in this market segment, which is as a result of a lack of promotion in recent years.