The latest round of the National Visitor Survey results on October 3 by the federal government’s Tourism Research Australia shows growth across the board.

In the 2018 financial year, 32.9 million domestic visitors (+9.3 per cent) stayed 103.3 million nights (+6.7pc) and spent $19.8 billion (+15.2pc).

The growth in spend (+15.2pc) was almost double NSW’s nearest contender, Victoria (+8.0pc).

NSW leads Victoria by 8.3 million visitors, 31.7 million nights and $5.9 billion expenditure.

Queensland was the third best performer; however, NSW still led its northern rival by 10.5 million visitors, 13 million nights and $2.8 billion in expenditure.

Richie Robinson, Destination Riverina Murray general manager, welcomed the news, saying the Riverina had a strong tourism market.

“The Riverina is performing well from the economy’s perspective,” Mr Robinson said.

“We've got a lot of great offerings and the event calendar is important in increasing tourism, including the Gears and Beers event on last weekend that had thousands from out of town.

“We’ve also got the Warbirds in Temora coming up.”

Mr Robinson said it would be ideal to capitalise on the momentum and to improve on the state’s status.

In the 2017 financial year, the Wagga LGA had 1.2 million visitors who stayed 1.5 million nights and spent $353 million.

Minister for Tourism and Major Events Adam Marshall said visitors were not just coming to see Sydney, but more and more people were travelling to rural and regional towns to experience the state’s renowned hospitality and attractions.

“These results are the highest on record and show the work the NSW Government is doing in delivering results for the tourism industry which directly employs more than 171,000 people in our state,” Mr Marshall said.

“I’m very proud that rural and regional NSW leads regional Australia in domestic visitors and has achieved its highest number of domestic visitors, nights and expenditure on record.

“The NSW Government has set the state’s first regional tourism target of $25 billion in visitor expenditure in rural and regional NSW by 2030, so that every corner of NSW gets its fair share of the record tourist dollars.”

The North Coast (+8pc), Hunter (+13pc), Central NSW (+15pc) and Capital Country (+21pc) regions all posted significant visitor growth and across regional NSW overall visitor numbers grew by 9pc.

Both intrastate and interstate visitor numbers to NSW were up 1.5 million and up 1.3 million, respectively.

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