TOUR OPERATORS SUPPORT VISITOR ANALYSIS STUDY
Student research assistants were recently welcomed on board by Port
Douglas and Cairns reef operators to conduct visitor studies. The
research is part of the CRC visitor analysis study (Project 2.2.1) to
develop a more detailed understanding of tourists and the Great Barrier
Reef. Almost 1700 surveys were collected from visitors over seven days
on a variety of day trip boats.
The next stage in the research will focus on visitors on overnight
charter, cruise and game/fishing vessels out of Cairns and Port Douglas.
This work builds on the 1700 surveys collected between Townsville and
Mission Beach in 1994/95 and will enable comparisons to be made between
the regions.
The surveys were organised in Cairns in consultation with operators,
and with assistance from Ed Green of Reef Tourism 2005. The
success in collecting data was clearly assisted by the enthusiasm and
support of Cairns and Port Douglas operators. In addition to collecting
new data the research team is making considerable progress in analysing
the data already collected in the Townsville-Mission Beach region. Several
papers have been prepared for presentation at both the Congress on Marine
Tourism and the Travel and Tourism Research Association (TTRA) conference
including reports on analyses of patterns of access to the Reef, and profiles
of major reef visitor groups. The research team is particularly pleased
to have two papers accepted for publication in the TTRA proceedings as
the number of research papers to be presented at the conference is restricted
to 16.
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