Tourism Recovery Program

Program purpose

To assist the region to recover after the North and Far North Queensland Monsoon Trough – 25 January to 14 February 2019, a Community Recovery Package was made available and funded by the Commonwealth and State Disaster Recovery Funding Arrangements under Category C. The package included the Tourism Recovery Program.

The purpose of the Tourism Recovery Program is to support the recovery of areas of the state that rely heavily on tourism to recover from the devastating effects of the North and Far North Queensland Monsoon Trough.

Program status

The program concluded in June 2022.

Administering agency

The then Department of Innovation, Tourism Industry Development and the Commonwealth Games (DITID) (now the Department of Tourism, Innovation and Sport (DTIS)) led the implementation of the program with administrative support from the Queensland Reconstruction Authority (QRA).

Outcomes achieved:

Program

Outcome

Event Resilience and Sustainability Program

This initiative provided travel bursaries to DestinationQ events in 2019 and 2020. The initiative also delivered the TAFE Queensland online training course and face to face workshops.

Tourism Business Resilience Program

The resilience initiative developed the crisis communication toolkit and funded the development of an online health check for tourism related businesses and a financial counselling service.

Outback Tourism Education Program Expansion

This initiative promoted the development of new tourism products and provided increased subsidies for student tours of outback Queensland. A social media campaign targeted teachers and 1,000+ parents.

Regional Queensland Tourism Product and Expanded Infrastructure Program

This initiative focused on the development of a Resilience Platform that allows for a market demand assessment of projects using geospatial tools to identify tourism opportunities/gaps with a ‘lens’ of resilience to a range of disaster events and external shocks. This aimed to inform and provide an analysis for government and industry investment and initiatives supporting tourism development in flood-affected north and north-west Queensland local government areas.

 

More information

A copy of the full evaluation report is available on the Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience (AIDR) website.

(QRA Reference CM DOC/22/71010)