Theme Parks and Beyond: The Gold Coast Tourism Empire

The Gold Coast's tourism product, anchored by the 50 kilometres of surf beaches that define the city's coastal identity and broadened by the theme park cluster at Coomera and the Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary in the south to the Lamington and Springbrook National Parks in the hinterland, provides the most diverse and commercially developed tourism destination in Australia and the one that the international and domestic visitor market accesses at the highest volume outside of Sydney and Melbourne. The city's ability to sustain the beach, the theme park, and the nature tourism markets simultaneously reflects both the geographic diversity of the destination and the commercial investment that 60 years of tourism development have made in the infrastructure that visitors require.

The theme park precinct at Coomera in the northern Gold Coast, home to Dreamworld, Warner Bros. Movie World, Sea World, and WhiteWater World, provides the family-oriented commercial entertainment that the Gold Coast tourism market has built around the theme park as the centrepiece of the family holiday that the Queensland summer and the Gold Coast's weather profile make the natural setting for. The theme park operators' investment in new attractions and the annual refreshment of the ride and entertainment programs that sustain repeat visitation create the commercial entertainment ecosystem that the Gold Coast's family tourism market depends on for the duration and the spending per visitor that the accommodation and hospitality sector benefits from.

Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary, the not-for-profit wildlife sanctuary in the southern Gold Coast that has been providing the koala and kangaroo encounters for the international tourist since 1947, provides the Australian wildlife experience that the lorikeet feeding and the koala holding photo that the sanctuary made famous have sustained across 75 years of operation as one of the most visited wildlife attractions in Queensland. The sanctuary's combination of the conservation mission and the visitor experience creates the wildlife tourism product that aligns the visitor's desire for the wildlife encounter with the conservation education that the sanctuary's national parks partnership sustains.

The Hinterland, the rainforest plateau and escarpment country inland from the Gold Coast in the Lamington and Springbrook National Parks, provides the cool-climate contrast to the beach experience that sustains the ecological tourism market for the waterfall walks, the ancient Antarctic beech rainforest, and the birdwatching that the World Heritage Gondwana Rainforests designation recognises as internationally significant. The Lamington Plateau's cool temperatures in summer provide the relief from the coastal heat that the day tripper from the Gold Coast uses the hour-long drive to the plateau for.

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