Is holidaying in Australia worth it?

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This was published 12 years ago

Is holidaying in Australia worth it?

Margaret River is home to some of the most beautiful beaches I've ever seen, but it's not cheap.

Margaret River is home to some of the most beautiful beaches I've ever seen, but it's not cheap.

Two groups of friends, two holidays. It was Easter a few weeks back, and I had the choice of tagging along with two sets of mates on a couple of very different breaks.

One group was heading to the Margaret River region of Western Australia, for four days of wine drinking, food eating, and surf staring (too cold to get in, unless you're English). The other trip was to Phuket, Thailand, for four days of Singha drinking, poolside lying and chilli eating.

The dilemma was a familiar one for most travellers: stay in Australia, or head overseas?

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At a time when the tourism industry in Australia is copping a bit of a shellacking, it's an interesting question. Overseas tourists might be turned off by the tyranny of distance and the strong Aussie dollar, but the incentives for us to holiday at home haven't changed a bit.

But is Australia interesting enough, and does it offer enough value for money, to justify spending your hard-earned here rather than overseas?

Eventually, I chose the Margaret River trip. Mostly because my friend Rox was doing the organising, which meant all I had to do was rock up to the airport on Good Friday and get told what was happening. But also because I haven't been to WA in 29 years, and I was interested to see what it was like.

But would Thailand have been better?

A return flight from Sydney to Perth cost about $450 return. We had to hire a car to get down to Margaret River, so that was another $240 for four days' hire ($60 each). Our accommodation, a fairly basic two-bedroom flat in the middle of town, was $95 per person, per night.

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So our basic cost, no expenses included, was $890 per person.

My Thailand-going friends paid $800 each for their flights to Phuket, then they stayed at a pretty fancy hotel for $97 a night each. Basic cost for them was $1190 – $300 more than us Perth-goers.

Unfortunately, WA isn't the cheapest place to hang out. A beer in Fremantle or Margaret River goes for about $9 or $10 a pint. In Thailand, it would have been about $2. We hired a car to drive us around the Margo wineries for $400 for a whole day. My friends in Thailand spent a fraction of that on tuk-tuks into town (when they weren't lurching from the breakfast buffet to the massage table).

All up, I would have spent the same amount for four nights in Phuket as I did for four nights in the Margaret River, only the accommodation wasn't anywhere near as fancy in WA as it would have been in Thailand. So there goes one of the big incentives for holidaying close to home: cost.

What did we get out of the Margaret River trip? We got to hang out on some beautiful beaches, some of the best I've ever seen. We got to spend a couple of days hanging out in wineries and sampling the local product. We had a few fun nights out in the local pubs of Margaret River.

What did my other friends get? They had four nights in a fancy schmancy hotel near Phuket, hanging by the pool drinking Singhas and taking a tuk-tuk into town when they felt like it. They had tasty, cheap Thai food in town, and buffet breakfasts each morning.

Resort stays aren't really my thing, so I probably would have done my Thai weekend differently, but the nitty gritty of this whole situation is that my friends got to fly to a new, interesting country, soak up the culture, eat great food and stay in nice accommodation with great service for the same money it cost me to stay in Australia, eat average food and stay in average accommodation.

This is the massive problem struggling tourism operators around the country are facing. The thing they need to figure out is: what can we offer that somewhere like Thailand, or Indonesia, or Vietnam can't?

The answer, for me at least, is not much.

Would you prefer to holiday in Australia, or overseas? If the money was the same, would you go to Phuket, or Perth?

Hope you're enjoying the Backpacker blog – there will be a new one published every Tuesday and Wednesday on the Fairfax Media websites. To contact me with any topic suggestions or personal abuse, visit my website, follow me on Twitter, or email me at bengroundwater@gmail.com.

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