South-west tourism operators feel effects of reintroduced stage three coronavirus restrictions

Great Ocean Road Regional Tourism chairman Wayne Kayler-Thomson said the new restrictions would bring further devastation to the region.

"Just when operators were starting to get an income again, it's been cut short and puts them back to where we were before," he said.

"We're predicting it will take years for the industry to return to normal. We've done some investigating and we expect the domestic market won't fully recover until 2021/22 but the international market would take until 2023/24. We're predicting tourism levels won't be back until 2023.

"These predictions rely on the virus being under control by the end of year as the first three months are the busiest period for the region and an opportunity for businesses to recover."

Elm Tree Motel owner David Sargent said he lost $500 worth of bookings on Wednesday morning from people travelling to Warrnambool for work.

"That worries me," he said. "I feel we will lose a lot of business even though essential workers can move and a good number of people can still travel, many won't come now.

"Our bread and butter is the commercial industry and even though businesses are still operating, companies won't make people travel if people feel uncomfortable.

"We'll take it as it comes and see what happens next week."

Gum Tree caravan park owner Peter McCallum received cancellations on Tuesday afternoon and had rejected bookings from Melburnians trying to leave the city before the lockdown restrictions.

"It's a bit disappointing as these cancellations were for multiple-day bookings," he said

"We did have some inquiries for people trying to flee Melbourne but we didn't think it was the right thing to have them here for our community.

"Our tourism is gone; our borders are closed, grey nomads aren't travelling and there's no internationals.

"Victoria's name is mud now, I don't think a lot of people will come near us for some time; it's put the fear into everyone again."

Best Western Great Ocean Road Motor Inn owner manager Liz McKenzie said inquiries from Melbourne and international tourists had forced her to only accept bookings from essential workers.

"I've had a couple of cancellations but I wasn't getting many forward bookings, mostly last-minute reservations in the past weeks," she said.

"I had a call from someone from China and a person from a hotspot postcode and I just decided there was too much of a risk.

"I think the impact will be larger this time because of the lockdown and essential workers can't get out. Previously I had essential workers stay from the suburbs of Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and even from Perth.

"We will come out on the other side, but I think it will take longer than initially thought unless the government keeps giving us the JobKeeper."

GORRT believes further assistance from the state and federal governments is a necessity to ensure tourism operators don't shut their doors permanently.

"We've been in discussions with the state government for support packages and we've been advocating for the federal government to extend the JobKeeper to help businesses," Mr Kayler-Thomson said.

"The state government's cancellation package is useful but there needs to be more.

"Businesses are really going to struggle. We haven't heard of one closing their doors for good but we anticipate this could be a significant risk.

"The virus really highlights how important the visitor economy is to our region."

Victoria Tourism Industry Council chief executive Felicia Mariani said Victorians travelling across their own state delivered 80 per cent of tourism performance for the regions, and a large proportion of that visitation was from Melburnians.

"The tourism and events industry fully understands the need to urgently gain control of this outbreak," she said "These measures, however, are likely to be a blow that many tourism businesses across the state will simply not recover from.

"However, the challenge remains that many operators in regional Victoria rely so heavily on Melbourne as their primary audience. With metropolitan Melbourne now in lockdown for the next six weeks, it will have drastic impacts on our tourism operators across the state."

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