Quarterly statistics released by Tourism Research Australia (TRA) this month revealed the milestone figure.

The landmark year was over a 12-month period up to the end of last September when several big ticket events took place in the city. White Nights, the new Aura attraction at Sovereign Hill, and the third consecutive year of AFL football happened during that time.

It was also a year featuring the launch of the Made of Ballarat promotion, orchestrated by Visit Ballarat, the council's former arm's length marketing and promotion organisation which has since been disbanded.

The glossy campaign aimed at bringing more Melbourne people to experience the creative and culinary attractions of the city.

Major infrastructure projects such as GovHub and the V/Line upgrade would also have contributed to the increase.

The figures do not drill down into the reasons behind the visits.

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They do reveal however that the vast majority of stays are Australian visitors, with domestic travellers accounting for 990,000 overnight visitors in that year.

That figure surged by 28 per cent compared to the same period for the previous year, far outstripping an eight per cent rise registered overall for regional Victoria.

In Ballarat, there were more than two million nights stayed by national visitors - itself a leap of 37 per cent.

Also rising significantly was the number of international visitors staying, up by a third from 21,000 to 28,000. Combined with national visitors, they total 1,018,000 overnight visitors for the city.

The number of international visitor nights also skyrocketed by almost 75 per cent to a total of 417,000, which was more than the Bendigo Loddon region.

Day-trippers went up substantially too, up by 195,000 to 2.417 million, with visitors also spending more money on average than in previous years.

While staff at Tourism Research Australia advise caution, suggesting the most accurate metric is to look at trends over several years, the figures will no doubt be welcome reading to the city's tourist trade.

Tourism analysts consider the number of overnight stays a key metric, as those visitors usually account for much higher level of spending.

There was at least $591 million spent in the city over the year, not including international visitors, where information was deemed too unreliable to publish.

Iain Gunn, the chairman of Ballarat Regional Tourism, described the figures as "recognition of the hard work that has been done in the past."

"I would hope that we would be able to grow and improve on the figures we have been producing," he told The Courier.

"I know the City of Ballarat is working very hard on its events strategy and I remain optimistic and enthusiastic about the future for [tourism in] Ballarat."

The dates for the latest statistics are the last connected solely to Visit Ballarat, the arm's length tourism marketing and promotion organisation discontinued by council last year.

The next batch of tourism statistics, which are due for release in April, will be the first to include time when tourism marketing and promotion has been the responsibility of the City of Ballarat.

The decision to bring tourism and marketing in-house was taken last winter, a year ahead of the end of the service agreement, with the changeover process ending on September 30.

Councillors approved a recommendation to take the organisation - which had been run independently of council since 2012 - back in-house in June.

A disappointing increase in overnight visitors was cited as one of the reasons for the decision.

Many of the city's tourism businesses were outspoken at the time in their support of the work carried out by Visit Ballarat.

The service agreement was worth around $2.7 million annually. Most of the 16 Visit Ballarat staff did not cross over to tourism-related posts advertised within council.

The City of Ballarat has been running the events portfolio - which was previously part of Visit Ballarat's remit - since 2017.

Visit Ballarat was a trading name for Ballarat Regional Tourism. The latter is now set up as a separate entity focused on advocacy for the city's tourism and hospitality trade, focused in particular on a state-wide regional tourism review that is currently under way.

The City of Ballarat has since launched a Ballarat is Open consultation gathering community perceptions and hopes for the city, which officers said would feed into a Ballarat Prosperity Framework.

Former mayor Samantha McIntosh said in October that tourism targets would feature as part of that plan.

This week, the City of Ballarat announced a tender to deliver a "Traveller Experience Plan".

It follows a tender released last week for a company to help deliver a big new spring event for the city to replace the gap left by White Night, which will not be held in Ballarat in 2020.

In recent weeks, tourism in the state has been significantly affected by bushfires and now by the coronavirus outbreak. The CEO of Sovereign Hill Sara Quon reported this week there had been cancellations of up to 70 per cent among Chinese visitors.

Mr Gunn said the coronavirus had affected bookings at the Mercure, while the impact of the bushfires had been negligible compared to the eastern parts of the state.

"There's always something that crops up," he said. "We have to find ways - if we miss out in one area, we have to make up for it in others."

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