This summer runs from four Tests against New Zealand (9 December to 8 January, in Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney) to the Australian Open (11-31 January) and the 150th Anniversary Test at the MCG on 11-15 March (ABC News, March 2026⁠ (opens in a new tab); Melbourne Park⁠ (opens in a new tab)). Tourism Australia’s new strategy calls this the “major events runway” (Tourism Australia⁠ (opens in a new tab)), and it runs to Brisbane 2032.

Most of your region’s events are smaller: the twilight market, the agricultural show, the food and wine weekend, the outdoor cinema on the oval. They are also where most destination websites are weakest. An events page is usually a list of names and dates, with a paragraph of copy and a link to a Facebook page. It fills the calendar and sends almost nobody anywhere.

The event pages that work treat the event as the reason for a trip, answer the questions around it, and pass the Visitor on to the organiser and the Operators who will host them.

What every event page needs

Start with the facts a Visitor checks before they commit. If any is missing, the page fails at the moment it matters.

  1. Dates and times, in full. Start and finish, every day it runs, with the time zone if your audience crosses one. “Summer” is not a date.
  2. The venue, with an address. A map pin and a postal address, not just “the showgrounds”.
  3. How to book, or that you don’t need to. A link to the organiser’s ticketing page, or a plain sentence saying entry is free and unticketed.
  4. Getting there and parking. Shuttle buses, road closures, the nearest station, where to park and how early it fills.
  5. Access. Step-free entry, accessible toilets, quiet spaces, whether assistance animals are welcome. If you don’t know, ask the organiser.
  6. What to bring. Shade, water, cash for the stalls, a jumper for the evening session when the wind comes off the water.
  7. Status, kept current. Cancelled, postponed, moved indoors, sold out. A page that still invites people to an event that was cancelled on Thursday does real harm.

Structured data and status changes

Search engines and AI assistants read event pages more literally than people do. Google’s event structured data requires three things: the event’s name, its start date with a time zone, and a location with a place name and full address. It supports only events that take place in a physical location, and it is explicit that business hours, discounts and trip packages are not events (Google Search Central⁠ (opens in a new tab)).

Its handling of changes is the part teams miss. When an event is cancelled, postponed or rescheduled, Google asks you to set the event’s status and keep the original start date, so the event can still be identified. Deleting the page or blanking the date is the wrong fix. The same discipline helps every assistant that reads your page.

Where to send the Visitor

An event page earns its place when it sends people somewhere.

To the organiser. A prominent booking or information link, above the fold on a phone. Track clicks on it as a key event in your analytics; that number is your event page’s real result.

To the Operators around it. Accommodation within a short drive, places to eat before the evening session, the winery that opens late on festival weekend. Event weekends are when an Operator most needs to be found and when Visitors are most willing to book.

To the trip. A day-trip version for people within a couple of hours’ drive, and a weekend version for everyone else. Event-goers are often first-time Visitors, which makes the event page the first impression your region makes on them (more on that in what the June 2026 numbers say about day trips).

Ride the big events, even when they are not yours

You don’t need to host a Test match to benefit from one. A Visitor in Melbourne for the Boxing Day Test or a week at the Australian Open has spare days and a hire car. A region within a few hours can publish a page for exactly that Visitor: a rest day trip between Test days, a quiet coast after the noise of Melbourne Park, the day after the final. Name the event and the dates on the page. Don’t imply an official connection you don’t have.

Keeping the calendar current

  1. Retire past events promptly. A calendar full of last month’s events tells Visitors, and assistants, that nobody is watching.
  2. Don’t publish an event you can’t keep current. A festival that is “to be confirmed” every year is better described on a town page than listed with a guessed date.
  3. One source of truth. If events come from ATDW or an events platform, fix errors at the source so every site that shows the event gets the fix, not just yours.

An event that lives as structured data, with fields for dates, venue, booking link, accessibility and status, can be filtered by date, shown on a map, listed on the town page it belongs to and updated once when something changes. An event that lives only as a paragraph on a campaign page has to be found and fixed by hand everywhere it was copied, and it usually isn’t.

On Roam

On Roam, events are a built-in module alongside itineraries, deals and campaign pages. Events can arrive from ATDW or from Everi, one of the integrations Roam supports, and your team can add and curate its own. See the integrations.