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.
Here’s a little something I’d like you to think about. Are you really who you say you are? And, how do I know that I can trust you? Identity Theft is one of the most debilitating crimes a person can suffer for it strips away the very core of your own belief system and that…
Read More >‘World – we have a problem’ (apologies to astronaut James Lovell). We are killing ourselves with food and it’s happening at both ends of the continuum – millions starve each day whilst a gluttony caused obesity epidemic is killing others off in different ways. We have a growing global population requiring sustenance, whilst Climate Change…
Read More >Anyone looking at the final rainfall figures for Melbourne’s rainfall might be heartened by the news that the final result was about 10mm above the September average. Compared to last year’s disastrous result where we had about 12mm, it was over 50mm better. But I wonder if the final result, and the current ‘average’ isn’t…
Read More >Strategic Futurist Marcus Barber discussed the future of travel at the ANTOR session at The American Club in Sydney, NSW on the 24th of September. Along with Angela Smith from Roy Morgan Research, Martin Kelly from Travel Trends and Gail Rehbein from the Australian Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility Marcus proposed some of the emerging…
Read More >I’m heading to Singapore for a few days to facilitate a scenario planning workshop on behalf of the Asia Business Forum. There is something intimately exciting for a futurist to be going to arguably the most future focused of all countries and to spend just a brief time immersed there. There’s no doubt that great…
Read More >Greenwashing is a term used to define marketing actions by organisations, claiming to take an environmental approach to their products or services, when in fact, they are doing nothing or very little. Greenwashing is a form of marketing hype, and in turbulent times, many companies may be contemplating ‘sexing up’ their image by tapping into…
Read More >Strategic Futurist Marcus Barber will be the key note speaker at the Australian Computer Society’s annual conference to be held in Adelaide on July 30 at the Adelaide Convention Centre With the theme ‘Survive and Thrive’ Marcus will discuss the likely issues of the near term future and why right now, organisations do not have…
Read More >The next Advanced Strategic Planning one-day workshop being run by The Australian Strategic Planning Institute will take place at Rydges in Adelaide on the 13th of July and bookings are now open The TASPI workshops are jam packed with ideas and processes to ensure that your operational, business and strategic planning efforts deliver the…
Read More >Hands up if you remember the dot com bubble? Or how about the Y2K bubble? Housing bubble? ‘Bubbles’ as they apply to all things economic are little more than an oversupply of positive confidence in a particular area of economic concern. In fact ‘Bubbles’ are caused by the SAME things as ‘Recessions’ just at opposite…
Read More >Just a handful of places are left for The Australian Strategic Planning Institute’s one day Advanced Strategic Planning workshop at Karsten’s in Melbourne on the 26th of May. Please note that there are no places available for the June workshops in both Brisbane or Sydney, and the Adelaide workshop in July is half filled though…
Read More >