Ricky Martin was riding high in the charts. SeaChange was on the television. The Adelaide Crows won the Australian Football League (AFL) premiership. In 1998, a new method of collecting tourism data also began. An Australian householder picked up their landline phone and became the first to answer questions for the National Visitor Survey (NVS).
‘Where did you take your last trip? How many nights did you stay? How much did you spend?’ Market researchers acting for Tourism Research Australia (TRA) posed these and other questions in roughly 7‑minute‑long interviews.
TRA is the country’s provider of official tourism statistics. For 27 years until the end of 2024, it used the NVS to measure how and where Australian residents travelled – both around the country and heading overseas.
Now TRA has retired the NVS in favour of another approach, the Domestic Tourism Statistics (DoTS) collection. This combines online and face-to-face surveys with mobility data (aggregated, anonymised data from mobile phones).
Technical advances and people’s growing reluctance to answer the phone to strangers mean the transition to DoTS is necessary. It is a way of delivering a more efficient and effective data collection method into the future.
Still, TRA Data Innovation and Partnerships Manager Rod Battye is proud of the NVS’s role in visitor economy history. ‘It’s helped form the strategies and policies of successive governments over several decades,’ he says.
Australian tourism bodies and businesses relied on the survey to understand the market and grow their share. As official data, it established TRA as a go-to source for media and government ministers – a role that DoTS will continue into the future.
The NVS and companion International Visitor Survey (which surveys overseas travellers) also won global respect, says Battye. ‘We’ve had a lot of countries – maybe 2 dozen – engage with us regularly over the years to see what we in TRA are doing.’
At the dawn of the NVS, Australians made about 18 million overnight domestic trips every 3 months (December quarter 1998). Today that figure is just over 29 million (December quarter 2024).
The NVS was always better than the Domestic Tourism Monitor it replaced. The number of people surveyed – at an initial 80,000 people aged 15 or over – was around twice as large. The NVS also gathered more detail about locations respondents travelled to. This allowed better analysis of the impact of visitor activity on states and regions.
The NVS sample jumped to 120,000 after 2005. This followed a Tourism White Paper and aimed to improve the reliability of regional data.
Yet, the focus of the NVS’s first decade was steady, continuous improvement. TRA worked to make data:
In 1998, TRA published data 9 months after the period being measured; by 2024, the NVS was being published within 3 months of the end of the reference period. Until the early 2000s, the NVS offered data in single-year lots; now access to multi-year data is the norm. The launch of TRA online in 2006 improved this access.
In the era of landline phones, ‘everyone had an area code, so you could tell where they were living,’ says Battye. ‘Everyone answered their phone.’
But technology and behaviour changed, and the NVS had to keep up.
The NVS used a Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing system with phone numbers selected using random digit dialling. Around 2010, TRA began looking at how to include mobile phone users in the survey. This was to better reflect the Australian community and improve the data’s accuracy.
Both moves were world-firsts. ‘Obviously, the methodological transitions are massive,’ Battye says. ‘It wasn’t an easy thing to do and it took years to achieve.’
Battye says another major feat was the way TRA quickly adapted the NVS around the pandemic. Restricted movement during that period presented many challenges. However, despite a reduced sample size of 90,000, TRA continued to produce reliable data and analysis.
In 2022 and 2023, it even published NVS monthly snapshots, responding to longstanding industry requests for more frequent data. ‘It was an abbreviated dataset,’ says Battye, ‘but it gave people the essentials in a timely way.’
TRA also turned an administrative reporting tool into a leading indicator. The number of trips taken was ‘bouncing around a bit with lockdowns and other movement restrictions’, says Battye. This new leading indicator gave people the overall trend of whether travel was up or down on the previous month.
In 2024, TRA began publishing mobility data to complement the NVS, releasing figures just 2 weeks after the reference period. Now DoTS has overtaken the NVS as the main domestic tourism data series. This will incorporate mobility data into the measurement of official statistics.
Datasets like these rarely make headline news, but they underpin a nation’s understanding of itself. Australians think of themselves as well-travelled and adventurous. For more than a quarter of a century, the NVS has provided the data that’s proved this.
TRA is committed to continuous improvement and making use of the highest-quality data sources available at any point in time.
Learn more about Changes to Australian resident tourism statistics from 2025 on the TRA website.
THRIVE 2030 is Australia’s national strategy for the long-term, sustainable growth of the visitor economy.