Around 150 people gathered at the event to view the promotional material from Mudgee Region Tourism.

Each year, 100,000 copies of the visitor guide are printed and distributed around Australia to promote the region with the aim to increase visitor numbers.

Mudgee Region Tourism CEO Cara George explained they created a new look this year.

“We’ve taken some fresh new images, highlighting a lot of our nature aspects of the region, heritage and our villages,” she said.

“We’re continuing our food and drink theme throughout, but we’ve got some new features called the ‘I love Mudgee Region’ sections, and they are targeting particular demographics. We’re kind of talking directly to them in those pieces.”

The sections include:

The paper and size of latest guides have also had a revamp.

“We received some feedback that people would like a lighter weight visitor guide, so we’ve gone with a lighter paper stock, but we didn’t want to drop on the quality, so we’ve gone with a high-grade textural cover,” Mrs George explained.

“This year, the cover image is a little different. We’ve  kind of gone down the Instagram trend, which is aerial shots of amazing food on your plate.

“We’ve really focused on our produce, and had a bit of fun with it and it looks really compelling. 

The tourism sector is a competitive market in Australia, especially for attracting short-stay visitors, so the guide has to stand-out.

“When we’re designing the cover, we put that into an A4 display in the Mudgee Visitor Information Centre, to look to see that it pops out to us,” Mrs George said.

“We’re all about keeping ahead of the other regions and setting the benchmark.”