A RETURN of visitors has been a welcome sight for the tourism industry after trading through what has been a tough two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
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The Grampians region led the state during the pandemic for growth in visitor yield and nights spent in the region.
Grampians Tourism chief executive officer Marc Sleeman said the winter months were generally quieter months in the region but looking into the data he calculated visitation was up by about 10 per cent from pre-pandemic levels.
"It's challenging to compare year-on-year due to the pandemic, " Mr Sleeman said.
"But if I look at my accomodation statistics we are well and truly above 2019 for December, January, February, March so it goes to show we have increased visitation numbers from before COVID.
"We have a large domestic resident base within an hour or so of us such as Bendigo, Ballarat, Warrnambool and Geelong."
Looking into the data up until March 22, the Grampians received over 1.7 million domestic visitors - up by 33.3 per cent on March 21.
Visitors spent over 2.4 million nights in the region - an increase of 22.8 per cent.
In total, domestic visitors spent $455 million on travel to the Grampians - up by 17.6 per cent from the previous year.
Mr Sleeman said residents from across Victoria fell in love with the Grampians and the wider region.
"Many people who might have headed overseas during COVID came this way because there weren't a lot of other options," he said.
"The feedback has been people didn't realise the region was such a beautiful destination. We've connected with a brand new audience which is going to see repeat visitation.
"This doesn't happen without strong collaboration between Grampians Tourism and our Local Government partners who have strongly supported our efforts over the last two years to ensure we are in a strong position."
G'day Parks Ararat owner John Rickinson said bookings have been "steady" post COVID-19 lockdowns.
"We have had a lot of workers during the week with the weekends being Melbourne traffic," he said.
"During the week there is quite a few rail projects going on so probably half of our bookings at the moment is rail workers and Saturday night is people coming to town for the Aradale tours."
Mr Rickinson said the pandemic has left the business with a financial burden.
"Our bookings is way better than the last couple of years, it's good to have some normality," he said.
"COVID-19 hit us pretty hard, it probably cost us around $200,000.
"A lot of the tourist parks went down to 20%, but we went down to 60%-70% across the pandemic ."