NSW YEAR IN REVIEW

2014 has been a fantastic year for NSW, and our industry has seen some fabulous results in both the tourism and major events sectors. Highlights include securing the Major League Baseball Opening Series between the Arizona Diamondbacks and Los Angeles Dodgers, the world premiere of Baz Luhrman’s Strictly Ballroom The Musical, the return of Disney’s The Lion King musical, and a raft of new events across Regional NSW such as the Dungog Festival and the Australian Bowl-Riding Championships in Newcastle.

This year we also saw the biggest and most successful Vivid Sydney, where 20,000 international Vivid Sydney travel packages were sold and around 1.43 million attended over the 18 days, as well as favourites such as the State of Origin, Tamworth Country Music Festival, Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour, Bledisloe Cup and the Deni Ute Muster.

These events and the hard work of the whole industry have seen us grow visitation across the State, and we will continue to work hard to further grow these numbers in 2015 and assist the NSW Government’s goal of doubling overnight visitor expenditure by 2020.

NSW has achieved its highest volume of international and domestic visitors, nights and expenditure on record, according to the latest International and National Visitor Survey.
In the year ended September 2014, NSW received 29.6 million international and domestic visitors who stayed 162.6 million nights and spent $ 22.3 billion.
This meant NSW remained the number one State and Sydney the number one capital city in Australia for international and domestic visitors, nights and expenditure.

The latest NSW international and domestic visitor profile snapshots and time series reports prepared by Destination NSW are now available on the Destination NSW website. The full IVS and NVS reports are available at the TRA website.