Tourism – Visitor Survey data now live in economy.id!

Have you ever wanted to know how many visitors come to your Local Government Area (LGA) from interstate? Overseas, or as local day trippers? We are pleased to announce that we have come to an arrangement with Tourism Research Australia (TRA) to display some of their datasets in economy.id for LGAs.

This sort of information is vital for targetting your Tourism policy and getting the most out of your visitor economy.

Tourism Research Australia (TRA) conducts two annual surveys, the International Visitor Survey and the National Visitor Survey. These produce a great deal of information about visitation at the regional level, and a limited amount of data at the local level. Many of our clients already use these datasets at a regional level, but they have had difficulty getting access to Local Government level information.

Our arrangement with the TRA is to take their data and adjust it to LGA boundaries using a concordance of SA2 areas. The data has a seven year time series and will be updated annually and delivered through our online economic tool, economy.id.

What will the TRA data tell you a about tourism in your LGA?

The type of questions you can answer with these data are:

• How long do people stay in the area?
• Do we mainly get day trippers, or are people increasingly staying longer?
• Is our accommodation geared for the type of tourists we get?
• Are the numbers of visitors to our area increasing or decreasing? And how does it compare to the national trend?
• Why do people visit the area? And do local tourists visit for different reasons to international tourists?

How can you access the TRA data?

Local Governments who already subscribe to economy.id will find the dataset has appeared magically! You will find it under Custom Industries in the main menu.

We will also be able to use this tourism data in our economic consulting work.

What datasets are available?

• Visitors summary – the makeup of your visitor numbers by International, Domestic and Day-trippers – Is your area mainly attracting overseas visitors, or is it locals visiting for the day? How does this affect your accommodation sector?
• Visitors by number of nights – More detail in each category of visitors about the number of visitors, and how long they stay, including benchmark comparisons and change over time. Do small numbers of visitors stay a long time in your area, or are you a “quick trip” destination?
• Visitors by reason – Purpose of visit by type of visitor – Holidays, Friends & Family, Education, Employment etc. This looks at what type of tourism your area gets and how long each type of visitor stays.

This data can help you inform your Tourism Policy and plan for changes in the trend. We also have access to the raw datasets via the TRA Online portal, and can assist with additional cross-tabulations on a case-by-case basis, as well as making use of this data in our economic consultancy work.

Please note that part of TRA policy is that data they don’t consider reliable should not be displayed. For this reason we have suppressed data where the sample size is less than 40 (who visited the area, or in the relevant category, out of a sample size over 40,000). For some of our smaller clients this means that individual years’ data are generally suppressed, but we have included a 5-year average to be sure we can present some data.

This additional dataset is included at no extra charge to all our current clients with the full version of economy.id, and the Tourism Module enabled. If you don’t see it on your site, please contact us to enable this module.