Every figure below is a two-year average for 2023 to 2024, which is how Tourism Research Australia publishes these profiles. The business counts are a different basis, and are noted where they appear.
The Coast in one table
| Measure | Domestic day | Domestic overnight | International | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Visitors (000) | 3,506 | 1,616 | 38 | 5,161 |
| Nights (000) | 4,238 | 674 | 4,912 | |
| Average nights | 3 | 18 | 3 | |
| Expenditure ($M) | $435 | $842 | $44 | $1,321 |
| Spend per trip | $124 | $521 | $1,148 | $256 |
| Spend per night | $199 | $65 | $183 |
Day trippers are the volume and overnight visitors are the money. Domestic day visitors outnumber domestic overnight visitors by more than two to one, and yet overnight visitors spend more in total, $842 million against $435 million, because each overnight trip is worth about four times a day trip.
The part that is not really tourism
Tourism Research Australia also splits visitors by reason. For the Central Coast:
| Reason | Domestic day | Domestic overnight | International | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Holiday | 1,484 | 786 | 10 | 2,280 |
| Visiting friends and relatives | 1,238 | 672 | 24 | 1,935 |
| Business | 494 | 106 | np | 602 |
| Other | np | np | np | np |
np is not zero. Tourism Research Australia defines it as
Data is not publishable as the survey error is too high for practical purposes
. It
means the survey cannot support a number at that level of detail, not that nobody came.
Among international visitors the pattern is starker still: 24,000 came to visit friends and relatives against 10,000 on holiday. A region whose international visitors are mostly somebody’s relatives is not competing for the same traveller as a resort coast, and the 18 night average for international stays says the same thing in a different way. People staying with family stay a long time.
Against Wollongong, which is the fair comparison
Wollongong is the other big coastal local government area flanking Sydney, close enough in role that the differences mean something. Because both profiles come from the same collection on the same definitions, they can be set side by side without adjustment, which is the reason this dataset is worth the trouble of reading.
| Total | Central Coast (NSW) | Wollongong |
|---|---|---|
| Visitors (000) | 5,161 | 4,114 |
| Nights (000) | 4,912 | 4,088 |
| Expenditure ($M) | $1,321 | $999 |
| Spend per trip | $256 | $243 |
| Spend per night | $183 | $145 |
| International visitors (000) | 38 | 59 |
| International expenditure ($M) | $44 | $157 |
| International spend per trip | $1,148 | $2,655 |
| Tourism businesses | 3,650 | 2,303 |
The Coast is larger on nearly every domestic measure and on the count of tourism businesses, 3,650 against 2,303. The exception is international, and it is not a small one. Wollongong attracts about half again as many international visitors and more than three times the international expenditure, $157 million against $44 million, at more than twice the spend per trip.
Our view, on the figures above: the Coast’s visitor economy is bigger, more domestic and more spread across small operators than Wollongong’s, and its weakest column is the one with the highest value per visitor. We are not going to explain the gap from this dataset, because it cannot: it reports what happened, not why. A university, an airport, a convention pipeline and a marketing budget would all be candidates and none of them is in these numbers. What the profile does establish is that the gap is real and large enough to be worth a deliberate answer from whoever is responsible for the answer.
What the tourism business count is, and is not
The 3,650 tourism businesses are on a different basis from everything above. Tourism
Research Australia notes the count is
based on selected (tourism) ANZISCs from the ABS in the year ending June 2024
, so it is
a point in time from the business register rather than a two-year survey average. The
distribution is the interesting part: 1,643 non-employing, 1,133 with one to four staff, 683
with five to 19, and 186 with 20 or more. Nearly half employ nobody at all, and fewer than one
in 19 has 20 staff.
How we did this
Read directly from Tourism Research Australia’s local government area profiles dashboard on 28 August 2026, selecting Central Coast (NSW) and then Wollongong and reading each rendered profile. Every number in this article is the dashboard’s own published figure, including the totals, which we read rather than calculated. The reference period is the dashboard’s stated two-year average for 2023 to 2024, except the tourism business counts, which the dashboard attributes to ABS data for the year ending June 2024. Where the dashboard prints np we have reproduced np and explained it rather than treating it as zero or omitting the row. The comparison with Wollongong uses the same dashboard and the same definitions, so no adjustment was applied. We have not contacted Tourism Research Australia, Central Coast Council, Wollongong City Council or any tourism body, and the opinion in this article is labelled as ours and rests on the figures printed above it.
Sources
- Tourism Research Australia, Local government area profiles (interactive dashboard, Central Coast (NSW) and Wollongong profiles read 28 August 2026): all visitor, night, average night, expenditure, spend per trip and spend per night figures for both areas including the totals; the split of visitors by reason for visit; the tourism business counts by employment size; and the dashboard’s own data notes, being that the data is a two year average from 2023 to 2024, that np means data is not publishable as the survey error is too high for practical purposes, and that the business count is based on selected tourism ANZSIC categories from the ABS in the year ending June 2024.