The first signs of visitors trickling through to the Eyre Peninsula has excited the local tourism industry after the State Government encouraged South Australians to travel regionally again on May 8.
As COVID-19 restrictions eased, Regional Development Australia Whyalla and Eyre Peninsula (RDAWEP) tourism development manager, Sondra Stewart, said grey nomads were the first noticeable group of visitors coming to the area.
"Because we're a bit more remote from Adelaide, we're just starting to see the movement of people, like the grey nomads that were locked down at certain campsites, starting to move around," she said.
Ms Stewart aid the Eyre Peninsula was in a good position to welcome back visitors due to their traditional market being mostly intrastate visitors.
"Our intrastate market is about 74 per cent and interstate is about 26 per cent," she said.
"We don't traditionally have a large international visitor base — it's usually around four or five per cent, so for some tourist operators it's a significant part of their market."
Creatives on the move
Last weekend Adelaide based videographer, Kane Overall, travelled to the area to begin filming promotional footage for the South Australian Tourism Commission (SATC).
"The SATC are hungry to get content and to get things happening again," he said.
The videographer said once regional travel was encouraged again he rushed to Port Lincoln to film the peninsula's rugged coastlines and capture footage of great white sharks at Neptune Islands Conservation Park.
"Autumn's my favourite time of the year over there," Mr Overall said.
"There's hardly any wind and you get beautiful light to film — all the elements really come together."
Mr Overall, who often works overseas on filming projects, says he is happy to stay home and film around SA.
"There's been so many places I've been to overseas, and you see the places that everyone's attracted to go to and you think, 'Wow, we have something exactly like this in our own state'," he said.
Embracing longer domestic holidays
Fowlers Bay whale watching company owner, Rod Keogh, said he had received a lot of inquiries from South Australians who were meant to be travelling overseas, but were now using their leave to take a longer holiday to the west coast.
"It's really interesting to see that these guys are now looking within their state, but not necessarily travelling to local Barossa or Kangaroo Island," he said.
"They're looking at travelling for nearly a week or 10 days up the South Australian coastline."
South Australian Tourism Commission chief executive, Rodney Harrex, said the closure of international and interstate borders would hopefully leverage the state's tourism industry.
"We know that South Australians spend $3.3 billion going overseas each year," he said.
"We want to convert some of that here in South Australia."
