BUSINESSES NOT TO BLAME FOR TERRIBLE GAMES TRADE

NEWS that the Commonwealth Games cruelled the Brisbane visitor market would come as no surprise to businesses ravaged by the loss of usually-lucrative Easter trade.

Results of the National Visitor Survey yesterday revealed the number of critical Brisbane overnight visitors dropped by 14.2 per cent in the lead-up to the Games, contributing to an overall drop of 2.1 per cent for the domestic market.

Our city’s losses fly in the face of the state and national trends for visitor spend, which increased 5.5 per cent for Australia and 5.8 per cent for Queensland.

On the Gold Coast overall spend was down by 0.3 per cent, while day tripper spend in the city sunk an eye-watering 8.4 per cent.

It will be cold comfort, but the results vindicate local traders whose plight had been met by city leaders with quips about the slump being overblown or imagined.

Businesses were not to blame for failing to make their own success — the customers simply weren’t here.

Further wounding business owners is the increasing body of evidence that Games organisers knew what was coming and went ahead regardless with a brutallysuccessful scare campaign to keep people off the roads.

The statement from outgoing Gold Coast Tourism CEO Martin Winter yesterday said “the prospect of visitors delaying holidays to the Gold Coast because of the Games was flagged in the run-up to the big event”.

“We have seen other mega-events around the world experiencing this immediately before and after they are staged, so we are not immune to that phenomenon,” he said.

The downturn was also flagged when, a year ago, Griffith University warned the council’s Get Set for the Games unit the event would likely lead to economic contraction.

So organisers knew regular Easter visitors could stay away and spending could slow down, while industry insiders knew major events have a tendency to make regular customers reconsider their plans.

So everybody knew — except local businesses, many of which employed staff and ordered extra stock.

Others outside the retail and hospitality frontline were told to roster their workers off, work at home and reschedule deliveries.

It was expensive, it was inconvenient, it was destructive and — perhaps worst of all — it was unnecessary.

Traders set their expectations based on the information they received, and were then handed a public campaign that all but guaranteed potential customers would cross a Gold Coast holiday off their list.

Those lost dollars don’t come out of thin air — they are stripped from the households of business owners and their staff and the impact flows on in ripples as that lost money in turn is not spent here by them.

The question that remains is who’s going to pay for it?