Sovereign Hill tickets sold out while the Ballarat Wildlife Park had record crowds across the long weekend.

The influx of tourists comes as Victorians choose to spend the long weekend, and school holidays, travelling within the state rather than interstate or internationally due to the risks or inability created by COVID-19.

Sovereign Hill deputy chief executive Katrina Nitschke said patrons were queuing up each morning to get into the museum.

"It's not normal but we can see what normal looks and feels like. We have still got capacity restrictions in place and we can only release a certain number of booked tickets every day and they were snapped up within minutes on each day of the Easter weekend," she said.

Ms Nitschke said a thriving Sovereign Hill was an important driver for Ballarat's tourism economy.

"We know how important Sovereign Hill is to Ballarat and we know that tourism has been hit particularly hard by COVID and we know that Sovereign Hill is one of the key factors in making sure we have a really thriving Ballarat," she said.

"Seeing so many people in our car parks, we know that they come and stay, they come and eat, they come and do other things while they're here. They come and have a great day at Sovereign Hill and they end up having a great time in Ballarat."

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Ballarat Wildlife Park managing director Greg Parker said while the record crowds were welcome, it was difficult for the park to predict what lays ahead.

"Winter's the time when we have our lowest times and we're often managing our troughs by marketing to the international groups and group travel market," he said.

"Because that's not going to be there, it's really hard to predict how we're going to do in winter.

"Easter, for me, is a time where we stock up and then we'll be probably planning for predicting a fairly quiet winter, but I hope I'm proven wrong and the domestic market can actually keep compensating for the loss of other markets."

Mr Parker said a big Easter weekend was the park's 'last bite at the cherry' before warmer weather.

"As a zoo, unfortunately, we have a lot of fixed overheads and a lot of staff to look after the animals and nothing can be done about that," he said.

"There are bound to be fluctuations so what we're finding is our peaks are bigger and our troughs are lower and longer so how it pans out over the year is anybody's guess."

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