If you have driven any distance in Queensland you know the bright yellow “i”. Pull in, grab a stack of brochures, ask the person behind the counter what is actually worth doing, and leave with two things you had never heard of. For a lot of road trippers it is the first stop in any new town.
There are fewer of them every year.
What has changed
Cassowary Coast Tourism has stopped operating the Tully visitor information centre as an accredited centre, from August 2026. Executive officer Patrick Bluett told ABC North Qld that only 6 per cent of visitors to the region used it, and that foot traffic had been declining for a decade, particularly since COVID.
The economics are blunt. Mr Bluett said that even with volunteer labour it cost around AUD $240,000 a year in insurance, maintenance and rates to keep the doors open, and that centres “are not commercially viable unless backed by a local council”.
Wayne Clift, who manages the accredited visitor information centre network across Queensland, told the ABC that about 15 centres have closed in the state over the past decade.
The important bit for anyone driving north: there is still a visitor information centre at Mission Beach, just down the road.
Why people still miss them
The counter-argument is not nostalgia. Alex Murrie, five months into driving around Australia, told the ABC that a grey nomad had advised him early on to hit the information centre in every town, and that it repeatedly sent him to places he “had no idea about and no intention of going to whatsoever”.
His other point is the sharp one. Online, “you’ll just see hundreds and hundreds of places and ideas and photos and I don’t necessarily want to get to the same place that 300 people have just posted their Instagram video of”.
That is a real problem with digital trip planning, and we say that as a website. The algorithm shows you the popular thing, then more of the popular thing. A local behind a counter has no incentive to send you where everyone else went.
There is money in it too. A 2023 review by Painted Dog Research for Tourism WA found people who used a regional visitor centre spent about AUD $150 more in the region, adding up to AUD $261 million across Western Australia that year.
How to plan without one
The centres that remain are worth using. When there is not one, this is what actually works up here:
- Ask at your accommodation, and ask specifically. “What is good around here” gets you the brochure rack answer. “Where do you take visitors on a Sunday” gets you something better.
- Check the national park alerts before any waterfall or walking track. Closures in this region are frequent and seasonal, and a track being on a map means nothing about whether it is open today. We keep a running eye on this in our park closures roundup.
- Check road conditions separately from the map app. The Kuranda Range night closures and the Daintree ferry queues are both the kind of thing that will not show up until you are sitting in it.
- Go to the pub, the bakery or the servo. In small towns this is genuinely the information centre. Somebody will tell you about the swimming hole.
- Buy the local paper. Far North Queensland still has real local newspapers, and the what’s-on pages carry things that never make it online.
Where the remaining centres are worth a stop
Mission Beach, as above. The larger centres in Cairns and Port Douglas are still running. On the Tablelands and through the smaller towns it is patchier, so do not build a driving day around the assumption that one will be open when you arrive.
Mr Clift’s view is that the model has to become hybrid rather than disappear, and that centres still offer “the secret whispers, the sorts of things people didn’t even know existed”. Hard to argue with that. We just would not stake a road trip on finding one.
Our Innisfail guide and Cairns south guide cover this stretch of the drive, and there is more on planning the trip in our events calendar.
Closure detail, figures and quotes from ABC North Qld, 3 September 2026. Confirm which centres are open before relying on one.
