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Hi Terry - just a few things I thought of beyond my earlier reply.
The merchandising for the eclipse seemed fairly poor and I don't think the retailers realised what they were missing out on. The one eclipse postcard was fairly ubiquitous but there was little else. Tens of thousands of eclipse nutters from all round the world gathered in a tiny strip of FNQ, and little to take home as a souvenir. T-shirts were rare but I did pick up a fairly bland one at Palm Cove. I asked quite a few retailers at Port Douglas about eclipse T-shirts but they all looked at me blankly! We had 6 overseas people in our little group and all would have bought T-shirts if anything decent was on offer - as it stands we're going to print our own. I saw a weird eclipse 'sculpture' at one shop in PD but you had to register to get one and there was no price. A man was selling his self-produced eclipse videos at a community market at Mossman on the Saturday after but I didn't see them for sale anywhere else.
I don't mean this as a criticism, just a big opportunity lost. You can bet the 2017 eclipse in the US will be massively merchandised.
As far as price-gouging goes, I didn't see any evidence of it myself accommodation or food-wise. Gouging can occur but usually complaints are by people who don't understand what it takes to run tourism businesses and the reasons why there are different rates. I spoke to several business people in Cairns and some said that this was the busiest time they had EVER experienced in the region. Not really 'off-season'! These are prime international visitor destinations so you expect to pay. And I expected things to be a bit more expensive there in any case, it's a long way from the big cities. We did the Red Centre after Cairns - definitely off-season there but that was so much more expensive again (except in Alice Springs). However there was no gouging going on that I could see.
Cheers -
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