TASMANIA is enjoying a massive tourism boom, with visitor spend significantly outshining pre-pandemic levels, Tourism Tasmania’s new CEO, Sarah Clark, revealed this week at the Australian Tourism Exchange.
“Visitors are spending substantially more on their trips”, Clark explained. “For the year of 2022, our spend absolutely smashed our previous record – we had $3.5 billion in visitor spend, and prior to that, the largest spend we’d ever seen in a year was $2.25 billion”.
Tourism Tasmania is anticipating that visitor spend will return to normal levels over the coming months, but is confident in continued growth, given the strong recovery in the domestic market and provided international numbers bounce back.
“The last 18 months or so it’s been a massive boom for tourism in Tassie, and we’ve recovered really well from a domestic bookings perspective,” Clark said.
“Pre-COVID our numbers were around 15% international, so we’ve always been big in domestic, but now we’d be more 95% domestic just while international builds back.
“We’re about 70% down on international numbers at the moment, but we’re definitely seeing that climb back up again. Obviously China hasn’t hit back to where they were and that was one of our top markets, but we’re seeing the US really start to come back and the UK, Singapore, and also New Zealand.”
Clark also shared that visitor satisfaction remains high, despite the island state’s industry skill shortage issues, saying, “our customer satisfaction score held and it’s actually a couple of percentage points above what it was pre-COVID…so even with those challenges, it’s still a really good customer experience”.
