Sydneysiders make do with road trips now they’re barred from our beautiful beaches

BYRON Bay is becoming the destination of choice for roadtrip holiday makers within NSW, new data shows.

A Road Trip Index generated by data from travellers using TripTech apps highlights the steady week-on-week increase of holiday traffic to various parts of the state, with the laid-back north coast recording the strongest growth of all NSW regions.

Over the past five weeks, the area stretching from Ballina to Tweed Heads has recorded an average growth in holiday traffic of more than 5 per cent each week.

Trips to the outback of the state – taking in mining towns including Broken Hill, Minindee, Silverton, White Cliffs and Bourke – have also been rising, with an average increase in road trippers of 3.7 per cent each week.

The data comes from a suite of 14 TripTech apps produced for car hire companies, accommodation providers and RV hire companies and includes CamperMate, which has more than two million downloads.

Tourism experts say the encouraging figures are the green shoots of a recovering industry and show that Sydney-based road trippers are venturing further afield than “close to home” destinations such as the Blue Mountains.

“Even at this early stage of what will be a long road back to recovery, our Independent Road Travel Index is showing a clear and sustainable increase in the number of Australians returning to travel, and they are almost exclusively doing so by road,” TripTech chief Nick Baker said.

“The road trip is not just back in vogue, but it could be here to stay and become entrenched as the primary and most popular means of tourist and leisure travel within and across Australia.”

Australian Tourism Industry Council executive director Simon Westaway said that although talk had raced ahead to a discussion of transTasman bubbles, the reality was that intrastate and some interstate travel was all that was available right now.

“It’s human nature to be optimistic, but some of the optimism around the reopening of the travel market, both domestically and internationally, has needed to be parked,” he said.