Helping build up tourism on Australia’s Gold Coast

As one of Australia’s top tourist destinations, the City of Gold Coast wanted to leverage payments data to support more informed decisions about economic development and investments in tourism and events. As 2020 was a very tough year for tourism, the city also sought a deeper understanding of how its primary areas visited by tourists responded to disruptions from COVID-19 lockdowns and travel restrictions.

Action

• Visa partnered with the government council to develop a dedicated tourism insights dashboard based on VisaNet transaction data.
• The insights provided by Visa helped inform an understanding of how visitors spend, where they come from, and how trends have changed over time.

Status

The payments data helped the City of Gold Coast to develop an evidence based methodology for the analysis of events and their impact on the local economy. The data also supported greater insight into the pandemic’s impact on visitor trends to provide information for tourism strategy and policymaking.