To put it in perspective, oyster farming generates $1370 an hour.

In 1997 - when hundreds of people contracted hepatitis A and one died from eating local oysters - fears that Forster’s industry would crumble prompted an expensive overhaul.

In other words, it was decided that the regional economy could not afford to lose oysters.

After all, they bring in $12 million, the area’s second-biggest annual turnover.

Tourism is worth $245 million.

“Tourism is a big deal here,” Great Lakes Tourism manager Richard Old said.

“It’s by far the biggest industry in the Great Lakes. Even if you take those figures with a grain of salt – even if you say it’s half that – it’s still a lot of money.”

The stats come from a Tourism Australia report called Domesticate Research Project 08.

There is no graph to chart hostility, or the emergence of a nickname by which operators say some locals refer to visitors: Terrorists. But plenty say they’ve heard it bandied around.

One is Steve Atkins, who owns Great Lakes Winery at Wootton.

He says his business has grown “20 per cent” a year for the last decade, and puts it down to customer service.

“What makes me happy is when people come back and they know my name, and my staff’s names,” he said.

“If you’re a tourist operator, you’ve got to like people. If you don’t, act like you like them ‘til you do. The same goes for tradies, and retail. I hear ‘Terrorists this, terrorists that’ and I say ‘No, tourists. They keep us housed and fed’.”

The local tourism board is so worried by customer feedback to surveys in the Great Lakes and the Hunter, Mr Old took the step of including a recommendation at last month’s Tourism Insights lunch. ‘Good customer service – just be nice’.

“Can you afford to lose business over just not being nice?” he asked the audience of caravan park, high rise and tour group managers.

“I totally appreciate that people have bad days. Everybody has them. There are lots of grumpy, mean customers around. But if you have being nice as your baseline, you have a head start.”

The issue also makes high-rise apartment manager John Kellet bristle.

“You’ll always have the whingers, who can’t see past their own front gate,” he said.

“Of course people cry foul, but if tourism drops, they go out of business.