Tourism Council WA Evan Hall backs Labor’s big events strategy

The head of the state’s top tourism lobby group has backed Labor’s big events strategy to attract visitors to the state.

Tourism Council WA’s Evan Hall said The West Australian misrepresented his position by suggesting the “strong focus on one-off events had been to the detriment of the rest of the State’s tourism offering”, insisting that “ does not accurately reflect our organisation’s views”.

He also said The West misrepresented its position by saying the visitation numbers “proved the sugar hit from one-off events was not lasting”.

He had said: “Certainly, some events have been spectacularly successful in bringing in visitors from overseas, and particularly from interstate. And importantly, they’re visitors who probably wouldn’t have come otherwise. So it’s definitely additional visitation, but events are very expensive right now, and you really have to focus on which ones are going to get the best economic outcome for Western Australians.”

Asked if the State had focused on the right ones, he said: “Some of them have been successful. We’d really like to see just a broad focus on making sure we’re getting a very high return on investment in terms of visitor numbers and their spend from our events dollar.”