Who would want a job at Tourism Australia, the organisation charged with persuading international travellers to head our way?
Tourism Australia finished 2019 on a high note with the (mostly) well-received release of the Kylie Minogue “Matesong” campaign, which it then had to pull a few days into the new year.
The organisation’s 2020 plans didn’t include a catastrophic bushfire season or a global virus scare. Either one would have been like a massive stroke, paralysing part of the tourism industry; together they leave it in an extremely perilous state.
The current tourist season is already a bust for many regions, and potential 2020 visitors who don’t live in a cave are likely having second thoughts about a trip Down Under.
The media isn’t helping. Adrian Bridge, travel editor of the UK’s Telegraph, says he has a vague recollection of news reports on previous Australian bushfires, but nothing even close to the breathless reporting the current fire season has generated in the UK.
Bridge says the flow-on effect was immediate: “Our travel coverage follows news coverage, so naturally enough we’re going easy on Australia as a destination right now, and probably for a little while into the future.”
At the same time Bridge was shifting his coverage to other destinations, elsewhere in the Telegraph Australian-born author and columnist Kathy Lette did her best to rally the troops.
Besides offering some novel reasons for heading Down Under immediately (it’s summer, after all, and there are those lifeguards…), Lette did not hold back on her thoughts about PM Scott Morrison and his reluctance to admit a link between climate change and the bushfire crisis.
Some will worry about Lette raising that issue, as they’re concerned our government’s climate policies might be another reason for travellers to bypass Australia until further notice.
I’m not convinced.
Many in the US tourism industry had similar concerns after the 2016 election, but the forecast Trump-slump didn’t happen. In 2018 the US hosted almost 80 million visitors — a record high.
The current scope of damage to tourism, property and infrastructure can’t be downplayed, but I’m bullish about mid- to long-term visitor numbers once the fires are out and coronavirus is in check.
The experience of 9/11, SARS, the 2004 tsunami, the Bali bombings and numerous other natural disasters and terrorist events is pretty clear: tourists do come back, and generally sooner than expected.
I’ve watched travellers make surprising decisions for 25 years — either rationalising, forgetting or just plain hoping that everything will be OK when they land at a destination that has so recently been in the news for all the wrong reasons.
I’m more worried about flight times.
The journey to Australia from the US and Europe has always been a major reason for saying no to a trip, and that’s now exacerbated by the Greta-inspired flight-shame movement.
Although that is in its infancy, it has solid momentum and is unlikely to stall through lack of interest. If northern hemisphere travellers get into the habit of looking for alternatives to flying, they’ll find themselves hard-pressed to justify the 20-plus hours of carbon emissions required to reach our shores. Did someone mention the tyranny of distance?
I’ve always thought you’d need to be a masochist to run an airline, but on reflection I suspect running Australia’s peak tourism body is an even more thankless task.
No matter how much money the government throws at them or how good a job they do, the fact is there’s no solution in sight for their biggest challenge: for many international travellers, we’re just too far away.
Rod Cuthbert is the founder and former CEO of Viator (now a part of the TripAdvisor Group). He is now a director of Tokyo-based Veltra Corporation, and a former CEO and chairman of Melbourne-based Rome2rio.
Patent self-interest in this article-let’s have a balanced approach to this topic. As a tourist operator or the past 30 years I cannot brush off what has happened. Although nowhere near the centre of the bushfires disasters of this summer our business has been hit hard. But more importantly the whole east coast of Australia which largely depends on small operators who choose their occupation for lifestyle as well as profit are being forced out of the industry so their unique products which create so much of the charm of these places will be lost.
Yes it’s the scale of damage that’s notable. “9/11, SARS, the 2004 tsunami, the Bali bombings …” were mainly localised. The tsunami wasn’t but mostly didn’t affect major tourism areas. Foreigners can readily see that vast areas of our land have been burnt out. As you point out plenty of tour related businesses too. But as they’re mostly small (non donating) businesses the Party of Big Business is unlikely to offer meaningful assistance.
Also it’s only early Feb so plenty of peak fire season left. And that’s just this season.
So, Jenny and Mark, what are the options in your industry, mid to long term, if we take an Australia-wide perspective (big I know), that is, encouraging tourists to those places unaffected so far and rethinking different branding/s to maintain focus on Australia?
The US tourism industry is going strong because so many people want to see the US before it ends in November.
Perhaps one more reason to develop Australia’s hydrogen industry, then?
Because unless we can develop some kind of fuel alternative, the writing is on the wall for air travel in its current form. Air travel today represents around 8% of total global emissions. If and when the population gets serious about reducing carbon, flying vast distances purely for pleasure will have to go. Or, to put it alternatively, if you accept that climate change is happening and want to take action in your personal life, giving up an international tourist (as opposed to business) flight is one of the easiest choices to make: and people will make it.
If you happen to be a climate change-aware person from Europe or the US, then perhaps you will also see refusing to fly to Australia as an opportunity to thumb your nose at a bunch of climate denialist troglodytes who care nothing for their own country and who also don’t care about the damage they are doing to the planet’s shared atmosphere.
Our biggest draw card for tourists is our environment. There’s not much of a cultural nature to encourage people to make the trip. That means the people most likely to want to make the trip are the people who are most interested in the natural world, the very same ones most likely to care about environmental issues.
None of Scottie from Marketing’s spin can change that.
Perhaps we should consider a return to sea based visitors, then we could go back to the good, old days when the wealthy visitors on the high decks threw coins into the sea for the laughing half nekkid locals to dive for?
Fine traditon and keeps them fit.
There’s an experienced candidate for the Tourism Australia job, currently might be feeling unappreciated in a Canberra job he’s having a tough time holding down.