The massive missing piece of Australia’s Tourism approach
It’s taken me a while to get the Tourism Thinking piece together given the extensive travel this year that has enabled me to assess where Australia’s tourism is not getting things right. This update won’t paint the full picture (a couple of clients have first crack at this research) but it is important enough to be able to give you the quick thumbnail sketch. And let’s just say that complaints about the high aussie dollar are somewhat of a smokescreen even if it has choked a few travellers out of the marketplace. Here’s the quick take:
1. Going back to the enormously successful ‘throw a shrimp on the BBQ’ campaign featuring Paul Hogan, what everyone seems to have missed is the single core element that Commercial contained and it is this: Paul Hogan issued a PERSONAL invitation for people to come and visit. The Lara Bingle ’emulation’ failed utterly because it wasn’t perceived as a personal invitation but a somewhat rude demand for a reason why people weren’t coming. And the gloriously expensive ‘postcard’ model of recent times is still stuck in the old model of tourism. Other tourism groups here in Australia know I’ve been telling them to ‘move beyond postcards’ since about 2005
2. TA has failed to capitalise on the largest factor in its favour – Australians heading overseas. Can you get any more direct than to have Aussies heading OS hand over a PERSONAL invite to people they meet, to come to Australia? The advertising campaigns might be big and sexy things to put together, but they miss completely the CORE success capability available
3. In some of the more interesting places I’ve been to this year, there is a growing discontent with the Australian traveler. In one high end tourism crowd, an expat who has been living in that town for a few years told me that the ‘locals have had it with drunk, obnoxious and disrespectful aussie hoons who think they have a right to carry on like fools.’ A local police office I spoke to in that town said ‘unfortunately when it comes to social disobedience, more and more frequently we are finding its your fellow Australians in the centre of the ruckus’
There’s more to say about costs of hotels, poor service and other aspects. And if you’re in the Tourism industry in Australia, the personal approach is something I can encourage you to take a HIGHLY focused look at.
Columbia University’s Earth Institute have just made publicly available their World Happiness Report, joining the expanding list of happiness reports emerging ultimately from Bhutan’s Happiness Index. There’s some interesting results in this one and some that you might expect were more obvious, like the idea that at a certain point, more money won’t make you…
Read More >Whilst the main thrust of Australian economic activity is said to be in the hands of the Federal Government, we should not overlook the significant role that Local Council Government’s can have. As the Federal Government wrestles with falling taxation revenues and an apparent inability to get the message across about distributing the income of…
Read More >Strategic Futurist Marcus Barber chats with Vicki Kerrigan on ABC Radio Darwin about the challenges facing the Northern Territory, the farming and mining sectors. In summing up the emerging signs of a clash between agricultural uses of land and land use for resource and mining needs, Marcus uses the phrase ‘Eat or Extract’ as the…
Read More >As most of you know I nominated this year as the 2012 International Year of Resilience because frankly, that’s what I reckon large chunks of the world need right now. The twitter feed is #2012YearofResilience. I sent a few of these tips out at the start of the year and have seen a few of…
Read More >A new city is due to emerge in Darwin over the coming couple of years and the key question is – what sort of attention is being paid to weather related disasters in the design phase? Paul Dale on ABC Radio Darwin chats with futurist Marcus Barber about planning and weather. You can download the…
Read More >Dorothea Mackellar’s poem ‘My Country’ is best known for its second verse – “I love a sunburnt country, A land of sweeping plains, Of ragged mountain ranges, Of droughts and flooding rains”. As vast tracts of Australia again face the prospect of massive floods I wonder if our Urban Planners ever consider the significance of…
Read More >Potentially the biggest area of untapped competitive advantage (and arguably one of the biggest areas where costs could be reduced) is within supply chains. Most approaches to Supply Chain Management are linear and isolated with one player trying to squeeze the other with no regard to the overall effect of the full supply chain. It’s…
Read More >There’s a shift underway in the mining industry that will likely catch Australian airlines out if they aren’t paying attention – the shift toward ‘remote’ mining. Remote mining is being pushed by the automation ability across all aspects of current mining technology, which at the basic level, means that fewer humans are needed on site…
Read More >Simple question really. Or is it? In this quick article I provide an overview of the difference between strategy that is D.E.A.D and A.L.I.V.E Think of it as a potential ‘do this’ collection for your Organisation You can download the article for free here – ‘Is your Organisational Strategy D.E.A.D or A.L.I.V.E?’
Read More >Lots of thoughts for the year already underway, with some covering a range of ideas from ‘don’t cut corners on relative incidentals when the project is significant for you’ to ‘you can’t change your approach if you keep thinking inside the same box’. But for now a reminder about planning for your future: If you…
Read More >