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The Easter school holidays in Surfers Paradise usually mean busy beaches and bars, fully booked hotels and a bustling Coolangatta airport, but a lingering side effect of the pandemic is changing travel habits.
Key points:
- More people are booking their holidays at the last minute since COVID
- 80 per cent of Australians say the cost of living is impacting their travel plans
- International visitors are not returning as quickly as the industry had hoped
Gone are the days of planning holidays months in advance as more families are happy to wait until the last minute to book their flights and accommodation.
Industry insiders believe the trend is likely a "COVID hangover" fuelled by the residual uncertainty of border closures and lockdowns that cruelled travel plans for the best part of three years.
According to research from the Queensland Tourism Industry Council, people are less likely to holiday than they were this time last year.
Eight out of 10 Australians say cost of living pressures are impacting their holiday choices, leading to downsizing or travelling on a budget.
COVID hangover
Gold Coast hotel occupancy is sitting at 64 per cent for the Easter long weekend and just 56 per cent for the remainder of the school holiday period — down 15 per cent on last year — as pent-up demand for domestic travel begins to wane.
Rachel Hancock, head of strategy and stakeholder engagement at the region's peak tourism body Destination Gold Coast, says the trend of last-minute bookings makes it difficult for businesses to roster staff.
"COVID definitely changed the way people operate in so many ways and booking holidays is no different," she said.
"The workforce availability is still not back to where we need it to be.
"[Tourism operators] are having to navigate through having the staff available, but also when to put them on."
Optimistic outlook
The Sunshine Coast is experiencing a similar problem after a record-breaking 2022 during which visitors to the region spent more money than ever.
Visit Sunshine Coast chief executive Matt Stoeckel is anticipating accommodation providers will be at 75 per cent capacity over the long weekend.
He hopes the pattern of late bookings won't be permanent and says the cost of living crunch will not stop people from holidaying.
"We're going to pick up a lot more people over the next couple of weeks who are making a last-minute decision," Mr Stoeckel said.
"I would anticipate that the trend is likely to soften as the year goes on.
"It is not that people won't travel, but they might make some savings in the way they are travelling so perhaps looking for cheaper accommodation or not eating out as much."
Bucking the trend
There is a different type of headache for operators in the state's tropical Far North.
Paul and Teresa Boswell run a holiday park at Palm Cove, a tourist hotspot halfway between Cairns and Port Douglas.
Mr Boswell said the park had been completely booked out for the Easter long weekend and school holiday period since the start of the year.
"The phones are ringing off the hook," Mr Boswell said.
"We can't actually keep up with the amount of phone calls that we are getting so we've had to divert some of our calls to the NRMA call centre."
Interest in staying at the park is not only limited to the peak tourism season, which typically falls over winter, Mr Boswell says.
"Ever since COVID, when people couldn't travel abroad, they had a chance to see much more of their own country and realised how beautiful it is," he said.
"We've certainly become a pin on the map.
"Someone we've got staying with us heard about us in the United Kingdom from a friend."
Missing piece of the puzzle
While a resurgence in holidaying at home has resulted in domestic travel returning to pre-pandemic levels, the challenge for the tourism industry is twofold.
Many Australians are going overseas but international visitor numbers have not rebounded as quickly as expected.
More than 240,000 passengers will pass through the Gold Coast airport in the next two weeks, which is down from a record of 272,000 in 2019.
Airlines have experienced the same change in booking patterns.
Queensland Airports chief operating officer Marion Charlton said most of the "teething issues" of delays and flight cancellations that plagued air travel last year should now have been resolved.
"We have bounced back to more than our pre-COVID [levels] domestically," she said.
"Internationally has been a slower burn but we're getting there.
"We already have New Zealand back, we already have Japan and Singapore back and then we're getting brilliant new services [from Bali and Kuala Lumpur] starting this month."
The final piece of the puzzle is the long-awaited return of the lucrative Chinese market, which is ramping up and should reach 80 per cent of pre-pandemic levels by October.
Mr Stoeckel says the importance of China to the Queensland tourism market cannot be underestimated.
"International visitors are nowhere near what they were before the pandemic," he said.
"Until we start seeing very cheap international airfares, like we did back in 2019, we're not going to see those same types of numbers."