The Coast is Calling Travel Voucher program was commissioned by the South Australian Tourism Commission (SATC) as part of a broader government response to support coastal tourism businesses adversely affected by an algal bloom. The program aimed to stimulate visitation and direct economic activity in affected regions ahead of the September 2025 school holidays.

Nabooki was engaged to design, build, and operate the end-to-end platform infrastructure and service delivery for the program, drawing on its established track record in delivering government tourism stimulus campaigns across Australia. As the algal bloom continued to impact coastal economies through the summer period, SATC commissioned a second round of the program ahead of the December school holidays, running through to Anzac Day 2026. 

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The Challenge

Coastal tourism operators across South Australia faced a significant and sudden loss of visitation and revenue due to the algal bloom impacting the desirability of affected regions. SATC required a rapid, reliable, and consumer-facing voucher distribution and redemption solution that could be launched within extremely tight timeframes in time to capture the school holiday period.

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Nabooki's Solution

Nabooki leveraged its existing platform infrastructure and prior experience delivering similar programs for SATC to design and deploy four separate marketplace portals, one for each voucher type, within the required timeframe. This included:

  • Full design and build of consumer-facing marketplace portals
  • Integrated high-integrity voucher validation and redemption
  • A ballot registration system capable of handling high concurrent traffic
  • Automated SMS and email communications to both successful and unsuccessful applicants
  • An EOI and provider onboarding workflow with eligibility assessment and Asana-based tracking
  • Integration with existing payment gateways and multi-day booking functionality
  • Distribution of voucher payments to operators
  • An operated contact centre providing phone and ticket-based support throughout the campaign

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For Round 2, Nabooki extended the platform to manage significantly greater complexity, including:

  • Bulk property manager onboarding via spreadsheet upload, enabling 474 holiday home listings to be processed without individual EOI forms
  • Direct link-out bookings, allowing providers to manage voucher redemptions on their own websites with dynamic peak-period pricing, used for 40% of Round 2 accommodation bookings
  • A second chance draw mechanism, seamlessly reissuing 17,604 unused vouchers to unsuccessful applicants

Results at a Glance

Post-Campaign Achievements
Round 1 and Round 2 Statistics

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Program Highlights

Exceptional consumer demand

Both rounds were significantly oversubscribed. Round 1 attracted 123,053 applications for 20,000 vouchers, with more than 25,000 registrations completed in the first hour and no platform performance impact. Round 2 drew 112,339 applications from 63,065 unique registrants across a four-day ballot window , the slight reduction in applications relative to Round 1 attributed to timing proximity to Christmas and a parallel government dining cashback program. A second chance draw in January reissued 17,604 unused vouchers seamlessly, directly driving Round 2's higher final redemption rate.

 

Platform reliability under load

Across both rounds, the Nabooki platform maintained full availability under significant load. Round 1 processed over 1,300 bookings in the first 24 hours; Round 2 processed over 600 bookings in the first 24 hours while simultaneously managing Round 1 redemptions that were still active. New portal environments were built from scratch for Round 2 given the overlap in travel periods, and the contact centre successfully scaled to manage dual-round operations without impact to service levels.

 

Strong operator outcomes

Round 1 saw 236 operators participate across accommodation, experiences, holiday homes, and council-owned caravan parks, with many smaller operators reporting that the program converted high vacancy rates to near-full occupancy. 

Round 2 significantly expanded operator participation to 735 providers, including the first large-scale inclusion of property-managed holiday homes . 474 of the 538 new accommodation listings in Round 2 came through property managers rather than private owners. Nabooki processed bulk uploads for property managers at scale, enabling listings that would not have been achievable through individual EOI forms. 2,264 bookings took place in property manager-operated homes, providing inventory that was essential to program performance over peak holiday periods.

 

High guest satisfaction

Guest satisfaction remained consistently high across both rounds despite a significant increase in program scale. Round 1 collected 2,516 reviews at an average of 4.67 out of 5 stars. Round 2 more than doubled that volume to 5,251 verified reviews at 4.62 stars, with 73% of respondents providing a perfect 5-star rating. Qualitative feedback across both rounds highlighted the program's role in encouraging guests to visit regions and book experiences they would not otherwise have considered.

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“Amazing experience we only discovered due to the Coast is Calling experience voucher. Will definitely be doing the Spirit of Coorong tour again in the future.”
“We had a great day and would not have done this without the voucher as we didn’t even know it was a thing in SA.”

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Nabooki delivers booking and ticketing technology for Australian tourism businesses and government programs. For enquiries about government marketplace programs, visit nabooki.com.

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