Great State Vouchers snapped up in record time

The second round of the South Australian Tourism Commission’s Great State Vouchers have been snapped up in record time – with almost 75,000 vouchers being allocated in just 39 minutes this morning.

SATC chief executive Rodney Harrex said the outstanding result was a terrific boost for tourism operators across South Australia.

“Our southaustralia.com website experienced huge demand – at one point, the peak load recorded 112,000 requests per minute – which is 1,900 people per second wanting information about how to register. Nearly 15,000 vouchers were out the door in the first 10 minutes, which means the system was working overtime to get people verified and registered,” Mr Harrex said.

“In the first hour of the program, there were 3.1 million requests to southaustralia.com – a very strong indication that the vouchers were in high demand, and South Australians are keen to support our state’s tourism sector.”

The SATC also recorded more than 250,000 unique users on both southaustralia.com and the voucher registration portal today – considerably higher than the total visits for when the first voucher round was launched on 15 October (total of 182,000 users).

“Like in our first round of vouchers, the allocations were spread across the CBD and regional SA. In total, 26,536 were secured for regional and metropolitan SA and 47,883 vouchers were designated to the CBD and North Adelaide. Several thousands of these were snapped up by interstate visitors – which, as we know, are valuable travellers to our state,” Mr Harrex said.

“Today’s outstanding result means millions of dollars will be injected in accommodation providers across the state – and that translates to jobs, more people spending money in hotels and restaurants and more visitors to our regions.

“While we did receive some feedback that people were having difficulty securing a voucher, and I do apologise to those who did not receive a voucher, we should acknowledge that hundreds of thousands of people were trying to log in for 75,000 vouchers.”

By the end of today, everyone with a successful voucher will have received SMS or email confirmation. Those voucher codes can then be used to book accommodation, from 9am ACDT on Thursday.

You can find some of the available deals here. The full list of participating providers and available deals will be available on southaustralia.com/voucher from Thursday when the booking period opens, with more than 300 properties listing deals right across the state.