Every agency in the country has published a version of this post. Most of them were written by someone who has never sat across a table from an owner working out why the April long weekend came in twelve rooms short.
We have. So this one is written from that chair, not from the algorithm’s.
tldr; the 5 mistakes you’re making
One number frames all five mistakes. In 2025, visitors spent $19.2 billion across Western Australia. International visitors accounted for $3.4 billion of it. Interstate visitors accounted for $3.3 billion. Intrastate overnight visitors spent $7.9 billion, and daytrippers spent another $4.6 billion (Government of Western Australia, March 2026, using Tourism Research Australia data).
West Australians spent roughly $12.5 billion of that $19.2 billion. About two thirds.
Now look at your grid. Most WA tourism content is shot, written and scheduled as though the opposite were true.
1. You are making content for the visitor you want, not the one who actually books
The aspirational drone shot over the gorge. The couple silhouetted at sunset. The caption that opens with “escape to paradise.”
That content is built for someone in London deciding between Western Australia and Vietnam. Worthy audience. Small pot. It is not built for the Wembley family sitting on the couch on a Wednesday night, working out whether they can get to you and back inside a long weekend, whether the seven year old will lose his mind in the car, and whether there is anywhere to eat after 8pm.
That second person is the majority of your revenue and almost none of your content.
The fix. Split your content into two jobs and staff them differently. Inspiration content earns reach. Decision content earns bookings. Decision content is unglamorous: drive time from Perth with a realistic stop, what is genuinely open midweek, whether the road is sealed the whole way, what a family of four actually pays, what the phone reception is like. It will not win a Cannes Lion. It converts.
If you are not sure which of your posts do which job, our guide to building a tourism and hospitality social strategy is the place to start.
2. Your content inspires but never answers
Search stopped being a list of links. The Pew Research Center tracked nearly 69,000 Google searches from 900 US adults and found that when an AI summary appeared at the top of the page, people clicked a traditional search result 8% of the time, against 15% when no summary appeared. Links inside the summary itself were clicked about 1% of the time (Pew Research Center, July 2025).
For a WA operator that is not an SEO problem. It is an accuracy problem.
If nobody has published a clear, current answer to “how far is Kalbarri from Perth with kids” or “is Kelly’s open on a Tuesday in the wet,” an answer still gets generated. It is assembled from whatever is lying around: a 2019 forum post, an out of date listing, a review from someone who visited before you renovated. You do not get to correct it, because you were never in the conversation.
The fix. Publish the practical answers yourself, in plain language, on your own site, and repeat them in your captions. Distances. Seasons. Opening hours by month, not just by day. Access. What “remote” actually means for your property. Then keep them updated. Being the source is now worth more than ranking below the box, and a lot of WA operators are leaving that ground completely unoccupied.
Your website is doing more of this work than it used to. If yours has not been looked at in a while, start with the common tourism website mistakes that quietly cost you.
3. You are running an eastern states calendar
This one is almost invisible until you go looking for it.
WA does not share a calendar with the rest of the country. In 2027 our public school year starts on 1 February, while New South Wales students go back in late January and Queensland went back on 27 January. We take Labour Day in March, not October. We have Western Australia Day in early June, which is a genuine intrastate booking driver that literally does not exist in any other market.
Then there is the geography. A national content calendar tells you to promote a warm weather escape in January. In the Kimberley, January is the wet. Your peak and Perth’s peak are inverted, and if you are pushing the same seasonal content as an operator in Margaret River you are actively working against your own booking curve.
Lead times differ too. A Perth to Broome trip gets planned months out. A South West weekend gets decided on a Wednesday. Those are two completely different content jobs, on two completely different clocks.
The fix. Build your editorial calendar backwards from your own booking window, mapped against the WA school terms and WA public holidays, not a generic Australian one. Then work out how far ahead your particular guest decides, and put your inspiration content that far ahead of the date, with your decision content sitting close to it.
4. You stop the content at the point of booking
Most tourism content calendars end at the confirmation email. Everything after that is treated as operations, not marketing.
That is the single biggest missed opportunity in WA hospitality right now, because the post stay window is where three things come from at once: reviews, guest footage you did not have to shoot, and the third party mentions that answer engines lean on when they build a recommendation. Your happiest guest is also your cheapest content source and your most credible one.
The fix. Treat the 48 hours after checkout as a content slot with a brief, not an afterthought. Ask for the review while the drive home is still fresh. Make it stupidly easy to tag you. Build a small, repeatable request into your departure process rather than hoping it happens. Then use what comes back, properly, with permission and credit.
We have written before about what authenticity actually looks like now, and about how to choose between advocates, creators and paid talent when you want to scale it beyond your own guests. Email is the other half of this, and four years of doing it properly looks very different to a monthly newsletter.
5. You are posting a lot and asking it to do nothing
The last one is the least comfortable, so we will own it first: we have done this to ourselves. There was a stretch where Coffey & Tea posted more often than nearly every agency we track and had the lowest engagement rate of any of them. Volume was never the problem. The absence of a job for each post was.
Most tourism accounts we audit have a cadence and no architecture. Fourteen posts a month, all of them doing the same soft brand awareness job, none of them moving a person from “that looks nice” to “I have put a date in.” Then when bookings soften, the instinct is to post more, which makes the ratio worse.
The fix. Give every post one job and make sure the mix covers the whole journey. If you cannot say out loud what a post is for, do not schedule it. Cutting your output by a third and giving the survivors a purpose will beat posting daily into the void, every time. Reels remain the format doing the heaviest lifting for reach in this category, so if you are cutting, cut elsewhere first.
The through line
None of this is about working harder on content. It is about pointing content at the person who actually pays.
For most WA tourism operators that person lives within a few hours’ drive, plans around a school calendar the eastern states do not share, makes the call late, and wants a practical answer more than they want a beautiful one. Build for them and the rest tends to follow.
If you want a set of outside eyes on where your content is leaking bookings, get in touch. That is the work we do.
