Australians travelling in their own country are the backbone of the visitor economy and the key to its recovery and resurgence. The Australian Trade and Investment Commission (Austrade) uses its Tourism Research Australia (TRA) business to measure Australian tourism.

TRA’s purpose is to consistently collect high-quality tourism data that strengthens evidence-based policy advice, improves program management, supports industry, feeds into the national accounts, and grows the visitor economy.

Since 1998, the National Visitor Survey (NVS) has been the primary instrument providing data on Australian resident travel, domestically and internationally (outbound). The contract to conduct these data collections expires at the end of the 2024 survey year.

As such, Austrade has issued a Request for Tender (RFT) for Data to Measure Domestic Tourism Statistics that seeks a suitably qualified supplier to undertake this large-scale data supply project. Services include:

• Management and coordination of the large-scale data supply project including ensuring continuous improvement and effective interaction with third party stakeholders.
• Representative sample data collection through use of a variety of data sources with granular insights, minimising lag between data collection and release.

The project will deliver the ongoing measurement of Australian resident domestic travel and Australian resident outbound travel, at full capacity, from 1 January 2025. This also includes establishing the collection and initiation of data supply via a parallel run, at a reduced capacity, during the 2024 calendar year.

The potential supplier should structure their proposal to demonstrate:

• previous experience in coordinating large scale national projects related to data supply and tourism
• the highly skilled resource pool they have available and the depth of resources they could deploy to the project.

The closing time and date for responses is 3pm ACT local time on  17 November 2023.

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