Alice Springs tourism industry treading water

By ERWIN CHLANDA
 
Spend by domestic tourists in Alice Springs and the MacDonnells in the past 12 years has been flat, almost to the dollar, when adjusted for inflation.
 
This is while the NT governments have spent more than half a billion dollars on promotion.
 
Meanwhile Australians nearly doubled their spend in Lasseter, the region that includes the Ayers Rock Resort, from $155m in 2005 to $259m in 2016, but with a drop to $214m in 2017.
 
Oddly, there was also a drop in domestic spending in Alice Springs last year, from $386m to $304m.
 
There was a significant decline during the period in the spend by international tourists in The Alice and the Macs (see graphs below), from a peak of $105m in 2006 to $68m in 2017, with a couple of nasty dips in 2012 and 2014.
 
The Rock region fared equally badly with overseas visitors, starting with a peak of $257m in 2005 to $189m last year, suffering a plunge to $147m in 2011.
 
It’s noteworthy that international visitors, inflation-adjusted, during the 12 years spent $2.5b in the Ayers Rock Resort region, two and a half times as much as compared to The Alice region, where they forked out a mere $983m.
 
Domestic tourists spent more in The Alice than at The Rock – $3.8b compared to $2.3b.
 
The figures in this report are from Tourism Research Australia. The inflation figures were worked out with the online Reserve Bank of Australia Inflation Calculator.
 
A report headed “Tourism dollars for Alice: not a pretty picture” posted on March 29 contained errors and has been removed from this site.