Tourism Port Douglas and Daintree (TPDD) has rejected figures from Australia’s peak tourism research body that shows domestic visitor numbers to Douglas have plummeted since last year. 

The report given to TPDD by Tourism Research Australia (TRA) several weeks ago claims that the numbers of Australian tourists visiting Port Douglas has dropped by 37 per cent, with the total visitor numbers from domestic markets falling by 40 per cent. 

TPDD was immediately suspicious of the shocking reported drop and started checking with local accommodation providers, who reported back that their domestic visitor numbers were either holding steady or growing, in direct contrast to TRA’s research.

It transpired that TRA had changed its research methods up from last year, including contacting survey participants via smartphones in addition to the traditional home phone surveys, producing the inaccurate figures.

TPDD executive officer Tara Bennett said while the mix-up was regrettable it would be unlikely to cause a loss of confidence by tourism investors because the report was only given to her organisation. 

“This is data specific to Port Douglas and it usually only comes to us,” Ms Bennett said. 

“The other people that have access to this data usually look at the big picture, so state-wide data.

“We’ve always looked at the National Visitor Survey results with a little bit of caution because they use quite a small sample size, which I understand to be under 200 people for a town the size of Douglas - so the results are more of an indication than anything else.”

Ms Bennett said the town’s tourism-oriented economy was more or less fully recovered from the damage inflicted by the Global Financial Crisis. 

“Last year we had good growth and hit 354,000 visitors for that period, as well as reaching 1.725 million visitor nights,” she said. 

“We are back at pre-GFC levels.”