World Heritage listing signifies globally outstanding natural and/or cultural heritage: a “top brand” in marketing terms. Does this branding as heritage icons confer economic value through increased tourism expenditure, and if so, by how much? To test this, we need to compare growth in visitor expenditure at World Heritage Areas, pre-and post listing, with unlisted but comparable destinations nearby. World Heritage listing involves a bundle of factors that may include actual differences in natural or cultural attractions as well as the recognition and marketing of those differences and, sometimes, increased infrastructure and ease of access. It is more critical to obtain time series of comparable data, than precise point measurements of current expenditure. Using a travel-cost approach, the two principal variables influencing aggregate expenditure are total visitor numbers and the distribution of visitor travel distances. For historical data, the only generally available surrogate for travel-distances is the proportion of international to domestic visitors recorded. Even for such basic parameters, data for Australian World Heritage Areas and control sites are rather sparse, more so than for Europe or North America. We compiled data for six Australian World Heritage Areas with reasonable control sites: Fraser Island; Kakadu National Park; Uluru Kata-Tjuta National Park; Tasmanian Wilderness; Shark Bay, Western Australia; and Central Eastern Rainforest Reserves (Australia) (CERRA). Results are as follows.

1. Total visitor numbers at World Heritage Areas are commonly up to an order of magnitude higher than at comparable control sites, both pre-and post-listing.
2. For most Australian World Heritage Areas, data are inadequate to determine whether there is a significant World Heritage icon value.
3. For the few Australian World Heritage Areas with adequate data to test, World Heritage listing does seem to have a positive effect on measures of tourism expenditure, particularly by increasing the proportion of international visitors quite significantly.
4. It would be useful to address the same question through a stated-preference approach, where total tourist expenditure is determined from new site surveys, and the proportion attributable to World Heritage listing estimated by asking visitors what they would do under various alternative scenarios.