While many businesses across NSW heralded October 11 as 'Freedom Day', Martin Fallding says his business is still waiting for restrictions to ease further before he can truly celebrate.
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Mr Fallding owns and operates Callicoma Hill near Mount Royal, 50km north of Singleton, providing self-contained eco-cabin accommodation and bush camping for visitors to the area.
"It's fair to say that it's been a very slow start," Mr Fallding said of the first week operating under reduced COVID restrictions, "and that's probably because people have a lot of other things on their mind like catching up with friends and family."
Most of Callicoma Hill's visitors come from outside the Hunter Valley, and Mr Fallding said many of his bookings had been pushed back or cancelled after it was announced Sydney residents would not be able to travel to the regions until November.
"Most of our business comes from Sydney and Newcastle and with Sydney still unable to travel the first week has been quiet," he said.
Mr Fallding said he sensed there was a different mood across the state now compared to previous instances of COVID restrictions being eased in NSW.
"There's a lot of nervousness around because it's not like earlier this year when things were eased and COVID didn't have any community transmission within Australia, where people felt free to go away without thinking about it," he said.
"I think now, because people need to be double vaccinated, which affects restrictions until December, and then even after that people are going to be nervous about getting groups of friends together to go camping."
While Mr Fallding said some of the messaging on restrictions from the government had been 'confusing', his business model had the advantage of already operating in a COVID-safe manner.
"We operate in a very private safe environment anyway because we only take one group at a time usually.
"We're quite adaptable and obviously, (restrictions have) had an effect but it's not something that we can't handle."
As Callicoma Hill awaits the return of visitors from Sydney, Mr Fallding said his business had plenty of options for residents of the Hunter looking to for day trips to explore their own backyard.
"We operate guided bushwalks and we're doing that again on October 30 and 31 so that's quite exciting and that's something we hope could appeal especially to local people."
