Belmont Wetlands State Park located in NSW Hunter region is a popular nature park which attracts thousands of visitors each year. The Park features over 500 hectares of sand dunes, walking tracks, wetlands, and beaches. Visitors to the Crown reserve enjoy recreation activities such as camping, swimming, walking, bird watching as well as four-wheel driving (4WD) on the beach.

Vehicle access to the park is managed through a permit system, giving 4WD access to the wetlands including the beachfront.

For many years the Park’s management committee had relied on an outdated, paper-based system to issue permits. The committee identified that the manual system was costly, inefficient, labour intensive and needed to be overhauled.

Nicole Dunn, Administrator at the Park explains the challenges of the paper-based system.

“The Park was incurring large costs to manage the paper permits system. The manual data processing of applications by staff was very inefficient, not to mention the safety concerns for staff handling cash payments with a system that was not flexible and was not user friendly”, says Nicole.

‘We knew it was time to investigate how the use of modern technology could improve the management of permit sales, assist rangers to manage onsite access and safety, and improve the overall experience for our visitors’.

The online permit system has been running for eight months and has significantly changed the Parks management of operations. Since its introduction, 11,432 permits have been issued, with over 80% bought on mobile devices.

Read more on the NSW Government website here.