But there are fears that even worse news is ahead for tourism and accommodation operators across the city and regional Victoria.

New statistics released from the federal government's National Visitor Survey shows Ballarat has lost about a third of its overnight visitor numbers in 2019-20 and it is the holiday and leisure market that has felt the greatest pain.

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End of financial year stats show there were 709,000 bed nights in Ballarat throughout the 2019-20 financial year, a drop from a record 927,000 bed nights in the city the previous year.

It is the holiday and leisure market that has most suffered with a drop from 321,000 to 213,000 nights.

Victorian Tourism Industry Council chief executive Felicia Mariani said she fears this survey will only be the start of the bad news for Victoria.

"This survey is to the period to the end of June, and basically Victoria is at $25.5 billion in tourism revenue to year end of June 2020, which is an 18 per cent decline year on year," Ms Mariani said.

"If you compare that to other states, decline in New South Wales was 20 per cent, decline in Queensland was was 17 per cent. South Australia went down 18 per cent, the Northern Territory is down 26 per cent.

"But since then those states have reactivated in some form as we shut down. They've had something, we've had nothing."

Not since 2014 was Ballarat's leisure market as low as it is presently, when there were 204,000 holiday nights in the city.

Since then, numbers have steadily climbed, peaking last year at over 320,000.

Ms Mariani said whichever way people looked at the figures, the facts remained Victoria would be at least six months behind the rest of the country going forward.

"The key thing here is we need to understand this is going to need to be a three-to-five year recovery to only get us back to where we were in 2019," she said.

"Reputation damage remains to be seen as well. There is lot of work being done with sentiment surveys, firstly how consumers feel about travelling, then more specifically about travelling to Victoria.

"No one wants Victorians to travel to their state and no-one wants to come here. How that is handled will have to be left to the state premiers."

Ms Mariani said she feared that regional Victorians could be left out as the state attempted to reopen.

"There's lots of discussion about the Melbourne Cup, the Tennis, the Grand Prix going ahead, but behind those events, it's the festivals and events all across the state that is most concerning. Places like Ballarat and Bendigo live and die on their events and that has been decimated.

"People say if we open up regions it will be okay, but we know and understand they won't look at region by region.

"The facts remain that until Melbourne can get out and travel, regional Victoria will never recover, you can't rely just on region-to-region travel to return the sector, you need the population movement from Melbourne."

The Courier requested an interview with a City of Ballarat representative, but it was told that due to council being in caretaker mode leading into the elections later this month, it was unable to provide comment.

Ms Mariani said the positive was that the industry had proven to be one of the most resilient, creative and responsive in the world.

"There will be lots of things that will be different when this is over," she said.

"You look at 9/11, how quickly did our industry respond and be able to accommodate compliance, we found our way through.

"This is an industry with compliance and regulation in our DNA, it's the way we have to operate.

"If you can tell us the rules, tells us the risks, tell us how to apply, we'll do it well."

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