What is the significance of “Repeat visits” to the Northern Territory?

The notion of ‘repeat visitors’ is considered important in tourism studies. Repeat visitors are those who go to a particular destination on multiple occasions throughout their lifetime. Many studies show that up to two thirds or three quarters of visitors in a destination at any time are repeat visitors. There is some discussion about whether repeat visitors are good or bad for a destination. On the good side, repeat visitors demonstrate customer loyalty, they provide a baseline of customers, they cost you less to market to, and they tend to have a higher sense of attachment to the destination, so they will work with you to improve things.

On the other side, if you are only attracting repeat visitors, you are not appealing to new customers, and you just keep churning out the same old products and ideas. Both cases (too few or too many) result in eventual declining markets as you either run out of new people to attract, or your old customers die. This has been likened to epidemiological models of disease spread. Unfortunately, no-one knows how many repeat visitors is the ‘right amount’.

Attracting resident populations to the Northern Territory can be likened to attracting tourism populations. The NT demonstrates very low rates of repeat tourism visitors (around 30 or 40%) when compared with other destinations. There are few studies anywhere on repeat migrations to places – there’s a bit of literature about ‘return migration’ which looks at people moving back to the place they started from, and some on circular or seasonal migration which looks at people moving in consistent patterns across time, but the ‘repeat migration’ we talk about here is somewhat different.

 

The Territory Mobility Survey included a sample of 98 people who had been born in the NT, moved away, then came back (the classic ‘return migrants’), and a sample of 332 people who were not born in the NT but had lived there multiple times. They offer an opportunity to start investigating issues of repeat visits –

• Do repeat visitors stay longer?
• Where do repeat visitors go when they are not in the NT, and how long do they stay there?
• Are they attracted or do they stay or leave for different reasons than first time visitors?
• Are there certain groups more likely than others to be repeat visitors?

This table summarises some of the raw data from the TMS, which suggests there may be some important differences in motives, demographic profile, and lengths of stay. These ideas will be developed as the research continues.