While many of Ballarat's major events in spring have either been cancelled, including SpringFest and the Ballarat Show, or are holding out some faint hope of running in some form, such as Frolic Festival, interim chief executive officer of Ballarat Regional Tourism Natalie O'Brien says the tourism industry will need to work to support everyone.

"For the next 24 months we're going to have to plan for a number of scenarios," Ms O'Brien said.

"It's beyond our control. Everything from big businesses to small community events, everyone will have to have different scenarios mapped out."

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Ballarat's Frolic Festival is one that is playing out scenarios and will make a final call as to whether it will proceed once the situation regarding Melbourne's virus outbreak is known.

Frolic festival spokesman Jay Morrison said at this stage the festival planned to go ahead with significant changes to the program and with no more than 40 people at a time at an event, but it would be six weeks before a final decision was made.

Sovereign Hill is another to change its product on the run, reducing ticket prices by half and only opening three days a week until September, in a bid to welcome back locals and regional visitors.

Ms O'Brien said the key for tourism was to follow the hospitality model.

"The hospitality industry has demonstrated it very well with take home meals and other options they have provided," she said.

"There will be a lot of energy used to keep changing and moving around but they've been a great role model in how to adapt to the environment in offering the consumer a slightly different product."

Ms O'Brien said Ballarat tourism could focus on the visiting friends and relatives market in the short term.

"It's about supporting the local community and its offerings," she said.

"Revisiting favourite places, even a favourite bushwalking track, or perhaps the gallery which you haven't been to since you had a school excursion. We need to reconnect with things we haven't done in a while.

"Visiting friends and relatives is a really important market, particularly for Ballarat compared to other regions. We need people to rediscover their own backyard and we want to share it with other family members.

"Also, what makes Ballarat special? Word of mouth is incredibly important, what do we have that will make people want to come back?

'I think it is really important for us to be clear about experiences we can have in Ballarat. When you're clear what experiences are, you know won't appeal to everybody, but you will be able to appeal to a certain demographic. With that needs to come electronic media campaigns that can be targeted to those groups.

"We just need to hold each other up and push along."

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