Tourism industry funds call

reprinted from Tasmania’s Mercury 18 July 2012
this excerpt comes after my keynote address on the Future of Tourism at Tourism Industry Council Tasmania’s annual conference

TASMANIA’S key tourism body has slammed the State Government for failing to provide adequate funding to promote the industry.

Tourism Industry Council of Tasmania chairman Simon Currant said more needed to be done to stop the decline in visitor numbers.

Mr Currant was speaking to more than 350 tourism operators at the seventh annual Tasmanian Tourism Conference, being held at the Country Club in Launceston today.

Tourism Minister Scott Bacon officially opened the conference this morning and said the State Government had “quarantined” Tourism Tasmania’s marketing funding from recent budget cuts.

But Mr Currant said it wasn’t enough.

“The forward estimates are reducing the expenditure of Tourism Tasmania this year and next year,” he said.

“This has to be arrested; the Government has to invest in this industry.”

Mr Currant said unless the State Government increased funding for the state’s peak tourism marketing body, there would be job losses in the industry.

He said this was despite the fact that Tasmania had a strong tourism product, as shown by five wins at the Australian Tourism Awards earlier this year.

“(The tourism industry) offers the answer for our state,” he said.

“We’ve got a natural asset here that everyone wants. We’ve got to tell people about it.”

But the state’s share of the national domestic tourism market was slipping.

Mr Currant said the number of visitors from Melbourne — traditionally Tasmania’s core visitor market — was dropping drastically.

Despite this, Mr Currant said operators should be “optimistic” about the future and invest in ways to improve the state’s tourism product.

Business futurist Morris Miselowski was the keynote speaker at the conference this morning.

He urged operators to harness the benefits of social media for their businesses.

Mr Miselowski said it was not enough for operators to rely solely on the marketing initiatives of Tourism Tasmania.

He said operators need to embrace new technologies and have a presence on social media sites such as Facebook, Pintrest and Tumblr.

TICT chief executive Luke Martin said the sites offered “unique and creative marketing options” for operators constrained by small advertising budgets.

“People have to be responsible for their own business and look at it as part of their own marketing activities,” Mr Martin said.

“It’s no different from the past where you look at buying an advertisement or paying for marketing information in a booklet.”

He said workshops at the conference aimed to lift the skills of operators across the industry.

Don’t bank on China solution

republished from Tasmania’s The Mercury – Hannah Martin July 13, 2012

TASMANIA’S tourism industry is wrong to peg its hopes on Chinese travellers and our wilderness appeal, says a leading futurist.

Business forecaster Morris Miselowski has cautioned tourism officials against putting “all their eggs in one basket”.

Mr Miselowski will be the guest speaker at an industry conference in Launceston next week, organised by the Tourism Industry Council of Tasmania.

Early this year Tourism Minister Scott Bacon and the state’s peak marketing body, Tourism Tasmania, predicted China’s growing middle class would give a much-needed boost to the ailing sector.

However, Mr Miselowski said this was a concern.

“I am never comfortable when we sit here and wait for one group to be the panacea of all of our ills,” he said.

“It just can’t be. We have to market for them and do work to entice them, but we also have to work in other markets as well.”

Mr Miselowski said catering heavily for a leading audience had backfired on other destinations in the past.

“The Japanese market was a huge boost for the Gold Coast, but a lot of people did not foresee that they would come and then eventually move on to another experience,” he said.

“Let’s not put all of our eggs in one basket.”

Mr Miselowski was equally concerned about the industry’s focus on promoting its wilderness attributes.

“My concern is that I’m not seeing great growth out of it. It’s becoming the same product repackaged,” he said.

“At some point it is going to become stale.”