BATHURST Regional Council is improving its partnership with the local tourism industry through the implementation of its new three-tier engagement approach.
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It comes after council developed the approach around 12 months ago.
Bathurst Visitor Information Centre (BVIC) staff have been leading the engagement efforts.
According to a report from council's Cultural and Community Services department, the network of tourism industry partners has grown 32 per cent to 185 during the 2020-21 financial year.
This followed council agreeing to waive all charges for the program as part of its business support in response to the pandemic.
Council held a networking session in May with 25 of the partners under the 'industry networking and cohesion' tier of its engagement approach.
Under 'sector based reporting', BVIC has undertaken work with the regional wine industry, leading to the creation of a new tourism experience, the Bathurst Wine Explorer.
BVIC also hosted a meeting for the accommodation sector in March with a representative of STR, the leading source of accommodation performance data in Australia.
Follow-up work is continuing to build engagement with this platform to provide benchmark reporting to individual accommodation providers and increase the aggregate data available to BVIC to inform decision making.
The final tier is 'capacity building', seeing an increased focus on building the digital capacity of operators and enhancing the industry's digital footprint.
The report on engagement also notes that BVIC's industry and partner newsletters reach a combined audience of 1086 people and have a 35 per cent open rate, which is well above the broad industry average.
"Engagement will be further expanded throughout 2021 and additional initiatives and the 2020-21 State of the Industry report will be reported back to council," the report said.
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