NEWS: Clarence Tourism Recognised for Excellence Clarence River Tourism has taken home the GoldAward for Best Visitor Information Centre at the North Coast Tourism Awards announced at the gala presentation dinner on the 17th August at the Ramada Hotel in Ballina.Since the revival of this award in 2010, the Clarence has received 3 Gold’s and Silver in this category.As a winner of this award, the Clarence becomes an automatic finalist at the NSW State Awards in November in Sydney. “I am delighted toreceive the gold at the North Coast Tourism Awards” said Jenny Massie, Manager of Clarence River Tourism.This award recognises excellence for the work we have done over the past 12 months in visitor information, destination marketing and product development including some major projects.” The devastating floods in 2013 led to a decrease of 9% in total visitors, but an increase in the duration of holidays resulted in an increase in total visitor nights of 8.47% spent in the Clarence over the past two years. This is significantly higher than NSW, which had a 4.3% increase.* Clarence tourism website had over 286,413 unique visitors, a phenomenal increase of 120% on the previous year. The visitor centres at Grafton and Maclean provided face to face assistance to 123,400domestic and international visitors during the year which is a dailyaverage of 338 people walking into the centres and 734 virtual enquiries every day. From a modest marketing budget, CRT has managed to leverage over $1.76 million in terms of press and television editorial. Clarence River Tourism has created a Facebook page and has seen likers jump to over 1,060 in the past few months with increase interaction from operators and visitors to the area. Bob Little, Chair of Clarence River Tourism’s board said “This is a great result for the Clarence, we are proud that we have been operating as a not for profit organisation for the past 35 years, working in partnership with Clarence Valley Council to provide this valuable service for tourism.” Clarence River Tourism has been working in close partnership with National Parks and Wildlife on the Wooli Minnie Water Tourism project.This project aims to assist with the establishment of new visitor experiences (in consultation with local stakeholders) designed to meet a growing nature based market. As part of the marketing program we developed a blog site called Wild about Wooli, a Facebook site with over 900 followers and a twitter account. Thanks to NPWS for their support.
Posted on: Tue, 20 Aug 2013 03:04:40 +0000
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