A SWAN Hill councillor believes the city should be aiming to strengthen the tourism trade through sporting events over the coming years.
A number of sporting tournaments across multiple disciplines have made their way to the region recently with organisers boasting more than 400 people could come on any one occasion.
Swan Hill Rural City councillor Greg Cruickshank said the sporting events were a step in the right direction for the region’s tourism industry, which is already buoyed by fishing and the Murray River.
“It has an enormous benefit to the town. The visitors come into our stores to shop here and they are roughly spending $100 per person per day they are here (on accommodation, food and retail),” he said.
“So if they stay for the whole weekend, that is a considerable amount of money and benefit to the town to have these people coming through.
“All of our sporting organisations keep an eye out to host competitions that will bring people to town and expose their sport.
“[Tourism] isn’t our biggest industry but there is a chance to grow that sector to be a bigger part of our economy, and we have a real chance to make these events a big part of our financial base.”
Recently, the 60th annual Inter-regional Tennis Championships’ organisers told The Guardian there were more than 700 people in Swan Hill for at least two days during their tournament.
This equates to roughly $140,000 being injected into Swan Hill, according to Cr Cruickshank’s estimate.
For more on this story check out Monday’s Guardian (February 22, 2016).
