Cultural experiences at the heart of new Sydney tourism focus

Sydney’s musicians, galleries, museums, restaurants and theatres will be at the forefront of a new national and global tourism rebrand as the newly elected NSW Government moves with its commits to “bringing cultural vibrancy back to NSW”.

Icons like Bondi Beach and the Sydney Harbour Bridge will have less prominence in Destination NSW  latest tourism campaign with the state’s tourism pitch to international and interstate visitors to highlight experience-based tourism.

Newly appointed NSW Arts and Tourism Minister John Graham said the new campaign is “going to be about the incredible experience you might have in Sydney” with Destination NSW to move its focus away from bed nights to a more experiential approach.

Minister Graham told the Sydney Morning Herald “to deliver bed nights in the next weeks or month is too narrow to capture the reason why someone might come to NSW, have an incredible time and come back in six months’ time and tell all their friends they have to come too.

“It’s going to be about the incredible experience you might have in Sydney, after dark, at a restaurant, go to the Opera House, then a small music or theatre venue.”

Minister Graham is a strong advocate of live music, with NSW Labor pledging during the election campaign to invest $103 million to double the number of suburban and regional live music venues in four years.

He also wants to see galleries, museums, restaurants and theatres promoted to lure more visitors both interstate and international.

Advising that “as soon as you do that, tourism becomes an arts and culture story” Graham also told the Sydney Morning Herald that he was broadly supportive of the five-year licensing deal to bring Texas based festival South by Southwest to Sydney.

However, he added “but I’m concerned that if it’s just a little bit of US culture dropped into Sydney, it won’t work.”

Minister Graham has committed to NSW getting its own arts and cultural policy by the end of the year.

NSW visitor economy leads the nation
NSW has been acknowledged as Australia’s number one destination, with domestic and international visitors delivering almost $42 billion in expenditure to the state’s visitor economy in the year ending December 2022.  

The latest Tourism Research Australia (TRA) International Visitor Survey and National Visitor Survey results show NSW led the nation for international visitor numbers, absolute growth and market share. The state also recorded the highest absolute growth nationally in domestic overnight visitors, nights and expenditure.

There were nearly 1.6 million international visitors who stayed 44.2 million nights and spent $5 billion in NSW in the reporting period. The growth in international arrivals was driven largely by travellers visiting family and friends, who stayed nearly three times longer than holidaymakers, plus booming interest in NSW as a travel destination from the United States.

In the year ending December 2022, NSW welcomed 93.8 million domestic overnight and daytrip visitors who spent $36.9 billion, leading Australia and accounting for 30.3% of all visitors and 28.3% of all expenditure.

Image: Experiences such as Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour will be key to Destination NSW's new marketing campaign.