By Jessica Powell - The Morning Bulletin
THE Yeppoon Visitor Information Centre has kicked off a bumper 2018. January had a massive 16 per cent increase in visitors through the doors of the centre.
Capricorn Enterprise chief executive Mary Carroll said her tourism and economic development body had received "extremely positive” reports from local tourism operators.
With the operators reporting visitation increases of up to 40 per cent from the previous year, Ms Carroll said the foot traffic through the visitor information centre reflected that growth.
"What is a welcome surprise, however, is the fact that a quarter of visitors through the doors were from our international source markets,” she said.
"We have been working extremely hard over a number of years to increase our international visitor numbers to our destination and we are seeing annual positive growth.”
The 1019 visitors to the Yeppoon Visitor Information Centre during January 2018 was up 16 per cent from the previous January, which had 879 visitors.
Of the 1019 visitors, 763 were domestic and 256 were international.
Of the international visitors, the highest percentage were from Germany (7.6 per cent), followed by the UK (4.3 per cent), Switzerland (3.1 per cent) and US/Canada (2.8 per cent).
Ms Carroll said this information directly reflected the efforts Capricorn Enterprise had been putting towards the western markets via self-drive itineraries, tourism trade distribution, sales presentations and hosting of key influencers.
"Sixty per cent of total visitors to our centre over the summer holidays were from within Queensland, which reflects our strong market within the 400km radius,” she said.
"Followed by 8 per cent from NSW and 4 per cent from Victoria.
"We regularly receive very positive comments about our extremely helpful volunteers, who assisted 14,000 visitors to our accredited Yeppoon Visitor Information during 2017.”