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The summer holidays start sooner than most teams plan for, and Christmas falls on a Friday this year:
Schools finish | Back at school | |
|---|---|---|
Queensland | Friday 11 December | Holidays run to Tuesday 26 January |
NSW | Thursday 17 December | Holidays to 27 January (Eastern division) or 3 February (Western) |
Victoria | Friday 18 December | Students return Thursday 28 January |
Sources: Queensland Department of Education (opens in a new tab), NSW Department of Education (opens in a new tab), Victorian Government (opens in a new tab). Because Boxing Day is a Saturday, most states add a public holiday on Monday 28 December; in Tasmania, Boxing Day itself moves to the Monday (Fair Work Ombudsman (opens in a new tab)).
Summer is when a destination website does its most important work, much of it on a dozen practical pages that decide whether a family actually comes, and whether they find the operators who are open. This checklist is for the last week of November, while there is still time to fix them.
1. Operator opening hours over Christmas and New Year
A familiar summer complaint about destination websites is the closed door: the café listed as open that shut for a fortnight, the winery that only opens on weekends in January. Visitors tend to blame the site that told them it was open.
- Write to your operators in late November asking them to update their ATDW profiles with holiday trading hours. The products on your site update from those profiles.
- Publish an “Open over the holidays” page with the operators who confirm, and the date you last checked it.
- Say plainly which days are public holidays, by state, and that hours may differ.
- Remember the machines. An AI assistant asked where to get breakfast on Boxing Day repeats whatever your pages say, so a product that still claims to be open every day is wrong in every answer that quotes it.
2. Events with dates, times and status
Carols, New Year’s Eve, markets and summer festivals fill the calendar, and each one needs a page that answers the trip around it: date, time, venue, how to get there, how to book, and what happens if it rains or the heat forces a change. Our event pages checklist covers the details. Keep status current: a cancelled event page that still invites people is worse than none.
3. Heat, fire and conditions
The Bureau of Meteorology’s October outlook expected warmer than average conditions across almost all of Australia and an El Niño at near-record levels (Bureau of Meteorology (opens in a new tab)). Summer pages should send visitors to the official sources for fire danger, warnings and closures, and say so in a sentence, not a footer link. If you haven’t prepared your crisis page, do it now; our crisis-ready checklist takes an afternoon.
Practical heat information belongs on the pages visitors actually read: shade and water at the market, the walk best done before 10am, the attraction with air-conditioning for a scorching afternoon.
4. Day trips and the long weekends
Summer is day-trip season for everyone within a couple of hours of your region, and day-trip spending grew much faster than overnight spending in the June 2026 quarter (Day-trip spending rose 23%). Make sure your one-day itineraries are current, open on the days they suggest, and lead with drive times.
5. Getting here when the roads are busy
Holiday traffic changes travel times. Update the getting-here page with realistic peak-day advice, public transport timetables for the holiday period (link to the operator, don’t copy), and parking information for the beach car parks and town centres that fill first.
6. The rainy-day page
Every summer has wet days, and families search for indoor options the morning it rains. A rainy-day page that lists indoor operators, with opening hours, earns its place. Make sure it exists, is linked from the home page in wet weather, and is current.
7. Accessibility and family details
Beach matting, accessible toilets, pram-friendly walks and quiet times at busy attractions are the details that decide a family’s day. Check that the pages for your busiest summer places carry them.
8. The visitor centre’s holiday hours
If your region has visitor information centres, publish their holiday hours and what they offer, and link them from the pages where a visitor is most likely to need a person. The questions the counter answers in summer are also the questions to answer on the site (What a visitor information centre knows).
9. Retire spring
Old campaign pages, past events and spring offers still in navigation tell visitors, and AI assistants, that nobody is watching. Unpublish or update them before the holidays.
10. Set a baseline
Note this summer’s sessions, operator click-throughs and top pages in the first week of December.
A last check before you log off
Who is publishing over the break? Name the person who can update the site between Christmas and New Year, make sure they can log in, and agree what counts as urgent enough to publish on a public holiday. Most summer problems are small and fixable in minutes, if someone is there to fix them.
On Roam
Operator products sync from ATDW on a schedule, so when an operator updates their holiday hours in ATDW, the change reaches your site on the next sync. Your team can schedule pages to publish and unpublish, so the holiday page, the New Year’s Eve event and the end of the spring campaign can be set up in November.
