Quarterly Patterns of Reef Tourism on the Great Barrier Reef -
Northern, Central and Whitsunday Areas
Survey Results
Alexandra Coghlan and Bruce Prideaux
School of Business, James Cook University
ISBN 9781921359071
Published July 2008
MTSRF Project 4.8.6 -
Analysis of recreational and tourism use and impact on the Great
Barrier Reef for managing sustainable tourism
Extract
This annual report forms part of a series of reports presented
by James Cook University on reef tourism in the Great Barrier
Reef. The research described here falls under MTSRF’s
research program to identify sustainable use and management of
marine resources of the Great Barrier Reef and specifically
the analysis of tourism use and impact on the Great Barrier
Reef for managing sustainable tourism (Project
4.8.6). This component of the research identifies annual
visitor usage patterns of the Great Barrier Reef to enable the
identification of key trends and drivers of visitor
patterns.
The data presented in this report summarise the results of
surveys collected between November 2006 and October 2007, as well
as reviewing quarterly results in keeping with this project’s
tourism
barometers, which are produced on a quarterly and
regional basis.
Under the MTSRF program the research presented here is
considered public research, which is stakeholder driven. The
stakeholders for this project are deemed to be (i) local and
regional tourism authorities such as Tourism Queensland, Tourism
Tropical North Queensland, Townsville Enterprise, and so forth;
(ii) industry, particularly marine tour operators and island
resorts; (iii) natural resource managers such as the Great Barrier
Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA) and the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) / Queensland Parks and Wildlife Services
(QPWS). For more information on the development of the survey and
stakeholder input, the authors recommend reading the technical
report, Reef Tourism:
Establishment of a Visitor Monitoring Structure (Prideaux
and Coghlan, 2007) (available from the Project 4.8.6 webpage).
In order to provide stakeholder-relevant data, this report
includes seasonal results across the four quarters starting in
November 2006 as well as regional results from Port Douglas and
Cairns (the Northern GBR section), Townsville (the Central section)
and the Whitsunday region. The results include socio-demographic
characteristics, travel behaviour, alternative destinations
considered, motivations and planning, and reef experience.
Each quarter of data for the different sections and the Great
Barrier Reef as a whole are available
online. Finally, this report also presents some of the
peer-reviewed outputs to date from this research, which are listed
at the back of the report.
