Tourism Queensland has released its tourism figures for 2010 with poor results for Tropical North Queensland coming as no surprise to people in the tourism industry.

But first some good news.

International visitors to TNQ rose 5% to 686,000 on the back of big increases from Japan (up 25% to 111,000 visitors) and China (up 76% to 72,000 visitors), the largest annual increase of any Queensland region. On the other side of the coin however, the overall number of nights spent in the region declined by 2% to 6.11 million.

Tourism Queensland stated that an increase in air capacity resulted in a boost to the number of New Zealand couples holidaying in TNQ in 2010, but UK visitation dropped off.

Domestically speaking TNQ performed poorly with the largest decline in visitors of any region in Queensland. 1.28 million visitors came to the area in 2010, a drop of 16% from 2009. The number of nights also decreased by 6% to 7.42 million or an average stay of 5.8 nights.

People living in TNQ reduced their holiday travel within the region with the downturn in the local economy identified as a significant factor. In terms of intrastate travel to TNQ, a 17% decline was recorded.

The amount of money domestic travellers spent in TNQ also dropped dramatically to $1.4 billion, a reduction of 17%.

Overall, just under 2 million domestic and international visitors came to TNQ, a decline of 9% from the previous year.