Most destination websites in Australia depend on a data source their Visitors have never heard of. The Australian Tourism Data Warehouse, ATDW, is where tens of thousands of tourism businesses maintain a profile once, and from where that profile flows to state and regional destination sites, to australia.com and to hundreds of other distributors. When ATDW changes, every one of those websites changes with it, whether or not anyone planned for it.

“ATDW 2.0” is the name we hear used for the next generation of that platform and its data feeds. This article explains what ATDW does today, what an upgrade of this kind typically means for a destination website, and the questions to put to whoever runs yours.

ATDW in one paragraph

ATDW was established in 2001 as a partnership between Australia’s national, state and territory tourism bodies. It describes itself as supporting over 50,000 businesses and carrying 90% of the nation’s accommodation and attractions (ATDW, About⁠ (opens in a new tab)). Tourism Australia describes it as a trusted database and distribution platform created jointly with every state and territory tourism organisation, whose profiles appear on hundreds of sites (Tourism Australia, ATDW guide⁠ (opens in a new tab)). In several states the profile is free for the business: Destination NSW and the South Australian Tourism Commission both say so, and SATC counts 250+ Australian distributor websites (Destination NSW⁠ (opens in a new tab); SATC⁠ (opens in a new tab)). Arrangements differ by state, so check with your own state tourism organisation.

A note on words. ATDW calls the record a profile. On your website it becomes a Product: the page, map pin and search result a Visitor sees for an Operator, an event or a tour.

For a destination marketer the model is attractive for one reason. The Operator maintains the record, the state tourism organisation supports it, and your website receives it. A migration tests that arrangement, which is why it matters when one happens.

How ATDW reaches your website

Your site does not browse ATDW. It is a distributor, and it pulls data through ATDW’s API. The developer portal documents this as the ATLAS2 API: searches, individual Products, categories, classifications, attributes and locations, plus a delta-update call that returns only what has changed since the last check (ATDW developer portal⁠ (opens in a new tab)). Your website platform then does several jobs in sequence: map ATDW’s categories to your site’s own, store or proxy the imagery, decide how often to check for changes, keep any content the team has added alongside ATDW Products, and render the result as a Product page, a map pin and a search result.

Each of those jobs is a place where an upstream change can break something. That is why ATDW 2.0 deserves a line in your risk register.

What “ATDW 2.0” refers to, and what we don’t know

At the time of writing, ATDW’s public site describes a website makeover and says the organisation is evolving with new technology and partnerships. It has also introduced profile types beyond the business profile: Destination Information profiles for attractions, stories and events; Journey profiles for drives, cycling routes, food trails and itineraries; and Information Service profiles for visitor information centres (ATDW for destinations⁠ (opens in a new tab)). What it has not published is a detailed public technical roadmap for the upgraded platform and API. Dates, field changes and cut-over arrangements reach distributors and state tourism organisations directly.

So treat anything specific you hear about ATDW 2.0 as something to confirm with ATDW and your state tourism organisation. The general shape, though, is predictable, because every platform upgrade of this kind touches the same things.

What typically changes in an upgrade like this

  • Endpoints and authentication. New API addresses and new keys. Your site’s connection has to be rebuilt and re-tested.
  • Field names and categories. Classifications get renamed, merged or split. Every mapping your site relies on has to be reviewed, or Products land in the wrong place or disappear from filters.
  • Identifiers. If Product IDs change, every saved favourite, curated collection and tier assignment that referenced the old ID needs a crosswalk.
  • Images. New delivery formats or sizes mean your image pipeline and caching rules change.
  • Sync logic. Delta updates behave differently. A site that polls too rarely shows stale hours; one that polls too eagerly hits limits.
  • New content types. Journey and Destination Information profiles are an opportunity, but only if your site has somewhere to put them.

This is routine integration work. The question is who does it, who pays for it, and whether it is done once for everyone or separately for each site.

What it means for your team

A migration is a good moment to clean house. Before any cut-over:

  1. Audit your local additions. Which Products carry content your team has added, and which have become custom copies? Both need to survive the move.
  2. Review curation and tiers. If you use Product tiers to show membership or prominence, check how they are keyed and whether they will carry across.
  3. List your custom Products. Anything not in ATDW is yours to maintain. Make sure the migration plan treats it separately.
  4. Decide your sync cadence. How current do opening hours and events need to be on your site? Write it down; it becomes an acceptance test.
  5. Test with your most complex Products. Multi-room accommodation, tours with several departures and events with repeating dates are where mappings fail first.

Who carries the work

A custom build has to fund and coordinate its own ATDW 2.0 migration: the agency scopes it, quotes it, schedules it around other work, and the destination pays for integration work that adds nothing a Visitor will ever see. On a shared platform the migration is done once, centrally, and every site receives it.

On Roam, the move to ATDW 2.0 is managed centrally, at no additional cost to you. The platform syncs 40,000+ ATDW Products automatically today, and because content is synced into Roam on a schedule, your site stays up even if ATDW doesn’t. How ATDW sync works on Roam.

Eight questions to ask whoever runs your website

  1. Who is responsible for the ATDW 2.0 migration, and is it covered by our current agreement or a new quote?
  2. When do you expect to cut over, and will we see it in a test environment first?
  3. How will category and classification changes be mapped, and who reviews the mapping?
  4. Will our added content, custom Products, tiers and curated collections survive the move?
  5. What happens on our site if ATDW is unavailable for a day?
  6. How often will Products update after the change, and can we see when a Product was last synced?
  7. Will the new profile types (journeys, destination information, visitor centres) be available to us, and when?
  8. If a Product is wrong after cut-over, who fixes it: us, you or the Operator?

A vague answer to any of them belongs in your risk register.

If you would like to talk through how your Products are presented today, and what ATDW 2.0 means for your site, book a demo.