Wonders of SW draw wanderers

The South West tourism industry is in the limelight for intrastate visitors these school holidays as the Margaret River Busselton Tourism Association continues to reinforce local tours and attractions through its “30 days 30 ways” campaign.

The campaign praises the recent State Government A Million Reasons to Wander Out Yonder initiative, sparking visitors to spend their “Wander Vouchers” in the South West region.

MRBTA co-chief executive Sharna Kearney said the campaign had highlighted the different ways visitors could experience the South West, and had so far greatly boosted Wander Voucher redemption in the region.

“The campaign prompts intrastate visitors to do tours in the region by promoting 150 local tourism businesses through the region’s destination websites and social media accounts,” Ms Kearney said.

“Alongside the destination website, bookings will be facilitated by the Busselton, Dunsborough and Margaret River visitor centres and MRBTA Central Reservations, which combined have 1.6 million interactions with visitors per year.”

Ms Kearney said the school holidays had started busy with most businesses running at capacity.

“There appears to be good visitation in the week either side of school holidays,” she said.

“Last school holidays were busy, and we expect that this will be the case for the summer school holiday period as well. This is in contrast to the periods between school holidays, which has seen reasonable visitation at weekends, but quiet midweek periods. Some businesses are still not opening mid-week as it is not commercially viable.”

Forrest Adventures general manager Matt Norton said he was seeing a great number of bookings through the State Government vouchers, and had noticed whole-family bookings for the attraction due to the discount.

“People are being encouraged to travel due to the 30days30ways campaign,” he said. “Even if every-one isn’t coming with a voucher, we can see lots of spin off from the promotional side of it. At the end of the day, if we don’t have customers, we don’t have business.”