Western Sydney is a key contributor to the NSW Visitor Economy and currently delivers $4.2 billion in visitor expenditure.
Western Sydney benefits from a strong calendar of major events, particularly centred on the Sydney Olympic Park precinct, and has a range of existing tourism infrastructure that ranges from the Wet ’n’ Wild theme park to heritage and cultural venues such as Powerhouse Casula and Elizabeth Farm. The region boasts 3,600 square kilometres of national parks, including the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area. Three new medical precincts at Westmead, Penrith and Liverpool, present multiple opportunities in terms of health education students, study tours, sports medicine, business events and medical tourism. Moreover, the Australian Government has confirmed it will build a new Western Sydney Airport that will be operational by 2026, creating up to 20,000 jobs by the early 2030s.
Destination NSW spends approximately $38 million each year on event acquisition and retention, marketing, public relations and content development and travel packaging for Western Sydney.
To overcome a number of key challenges, a cohesive approach to destination management is needed and a long-term destination management plan is required.
As part of this process, in April 2017 the NSW Government, through Destination NSW consulted broadly with more than 106 stakeholders to develop a strategy to drive growth in the Western Sydney Visitor Economy.
The result of that consultation is the Western Sydney Visitor Economy Strategy 2017/18-2020/21, which identifies specific supply side issues, including infrastructure and skills, and ways to stimulate demand, in order to grow the visitor economy.
In addition, the NSW Government has signed an historic Memorandum of Understanding with the Western Sydney Business Chamber and Western Sydney Business Connection, with a range of immediate and medium term actions to begin implementation of this strategy.
Download the Western Sydney Visitor Economy Strategy (PDF 5.3 MB)