The Effects of World Heritage Listing on Tourism to Australian National Parks

Abstract

A time series of historical visitor data was used to test whether World Heritage Area (WHA) listing affected the total number or origins of visitors to Australian national parks. Only six of Australia's 14 WHAs have sufficient data to attempt such tests, and these data have significant shortcomings. Whilst visitor numbers at Australian WHA's are commonly up to an order of magnitude higher than at comparable control sites, this cannot necessarily be ascribed specifically to WH branding, but may be associated more with political controversy over listing. It does, however, appear that WH designation yields significant increases in proportions of international visitors to individual sites.