Good luck to all MRBTA members who are currently working on their WA Tourism Award submission. Please find below some statistics and information sources which are out there to help you:
Question – Introduction: How does the business demonstrate tourism excellence?
This question usually appears as the first question in the submission, and asks you to consider how has the business been actively involved with and contributed to the tourism industry (locally,
regionally, and nationally) through both business and personal participation?
You may wish to outline your membership of Margaret River Busselton Tourism Association here, which is your Local Tourism Organisation (LTO).
Points you may wish to make include:
- Your investment: $599 per year for a Primary Membership
- Your return on investment
- Your business listing at margaretriver.com received X pageviews (email [email protected] for details)
- Your business was featured in X pieces of online editorial (email [email protected] for details)
- Your business was listed on the regional map: 150,000 copies per year
- Your business was featured in the Margaret River Region magazine: 20,000 copies per issue
- Your business gained referrals from staff at the region’s Visitor Centres (Busselton & Margaret River): 255,000 visitors during the award qualifying period
- Your business gained referrals from staff in the MRBTA’s Central Reservations team (responding to queries via telephone, email, live web chat and direct social media messaging): 50,000 queries were responded to during the award qualifying period.
- Your participation in the ‘Drive Your Story’ campaign activity which aimed to recover interstate visitation to the region. If you participated in this campaign, please refer to the campaign report here.
Question – Business Development/Marketing
The statistics below are most relevant for the Marketing section of your submission. However you may want to include some of the statistics in the Business Development section, when you’re outlining reasons behind a business decision that was made.
Visitor Numbers
- Margaret River Region visitor numbers:
- Domestic only: These are published at mrbta.com – view them here. The latest statistics available are to year ending March 2023. If you are referring to pre-Covid statistics in your submission, scroll down and refer to the statistics for year ending December 2019.
- Domestic plus international: The latest available statistics from Tourism WA are for the averages of the years 2021 + 2022. These are available here. The statistics are collated and calculated as averages to ensure the best possible accuracy of data. Unfortunately, the latest international visitor statistics for this region won’t be released until around December 2023.
- Western Australia visitor statistics (from Tourism WA):
- Please see the latest graphs from here.
- Please see a snapshot here.
Target audience data
For the question on ‘Marketing’, you will need to show an understanding of your different target markets. These links and statistics might help:
- Margaret River Busselton Tourism Association (Local Tourism Organisation, LTO)
You can refer to the statistics below and say that 984,000 number of visitors use the Margaret River Region destination website and social media channels to plan their holiday. These statistics are for the period 1 July 2022 – 30 June 2023:
- Margaretriver.com website visitors: 984,000 total users
- International: 156,000 website users
- Interstate: 182,000 website users
- Intrastate: 646,000 website users
- Margaretriver.com website visitors: 984,000 total users
- Tourism WA (State Tourism Organisation, STO):
- Domestic market profiles
https://www.tourism.wa.gov.au/Markets-and-research/Market-insights/Pages/Domestic%20market.aspx#/ - International market profiles:
https://www.tourism.wa.gov.au/Markets-and-research/Market-insights/Internaional-markets/Pages/International-markets.aspx#
- Domestic market profiles
- Tourism Australia:
- Future of Demand: This is a major report release by Tourism Australia late in 2022. It covers 143 experiences across 20 markets and four target audiences: the High Yielding Traveller, Premium, Working Holiday Makers, and a more generic Long Stay audience. There were also three deep dive sections covering Sustainable travel, Indigenous insights, and Accessible Travel.
- Tourism Statistics
Other Travel Industry Reports