Tourism rebuild reveal
GOLD Coast tourism bosses will launch a nationwide charm offensive in a bid to lure travellers back to the city in what is tipped to become an incredibly competitive market.
2022 is looming as a makeor-break year for the Gold Coast’s biggest sector, which has lost nearly $5B during the pandemic, with borders set to reopen the city to interstate and eventually overseas.
Destination Gold Coast chairman Paul Donovan said the organisation was already looking ahead to 2022 and how to best overcome the travel hesitancy which has dogged airlines and hotels in the Covid era.
“There is no question that all the research shows the Gold Coast is the place everyone wants to come to and now we have to reposition the Gold Coast so we offer everything there is to offer to intrastate, interstate and New Zealand, sooner or later,” he said.
“Sure we will do okay over Christmas but it will not be as brilliant as normal but now the confidence is back then the Easter period will be huge.
“The events market will have the confidence to book and a lot of our hotels will rely on it to fill their rooms.”
Mr Donovan said “a hell of a lot of work” still needed to be done to prepare for the return of interstate and international tourists in coming months.
It has been a traumatic two years for the sector, with
new data released in September revealing one in five Gold Coast tourism jobs had disappeared since mid-2020 and another 4000 were tipped to disappear by Christmas.
Tourism, the Gold Coast biggest sector, lost nearly $4bn of its pre-Covid $6bn-ayear cash cow in 2020 alone.
Destination Gold Coast CEO Patricia O’Callaghan said Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s announcement on Monday of a December 17 reopening of the state to fully vaccinated visitors – without quarantine – was a mile stone the industry would work toward.
But she warned the nature of the tourism industry would be different post-Covid and the city could not just rely on school holiday periods to survive.
“(Boosting visitation to the Gold Coast) will be the priority for this organisation and we are ready to do it now we have a timeline to work with,” she said. “We are also seeing travel behaviour has changed and next year we are going to see people travelling outside of school holiday periods.
“For us, the Gold Coast needs to be a 365-day-a-year holiday destination and we need to be filling rooms on every one of those days.”