Tourism Australia's latest campaign attracted over 29,000 uploads.
An international tourism boss has told Australia to ditch the “island mentality” and work hard to get tourists to visit Australia.
Taleb Rifai, secretary-general of the World Tourism Organisation said that: “Australia has lived for a long time … happy with its isolation,” he said. “That’s not going to work anymore.”
Mr Rifai was speaking at a recent international conference titled ‘Tourism Futures’ on what was going wrong with the travel and tourist industry in Australia and what steps the tourist industry could take to aid recovery. Holiday accommodation and costs are down by 6% as the industry struggles to attract international visitors.
Airlines and Australian travel agencies also had to reduce prices and offer heavy discounts to lure tourists in. The recent global financial crisis is blamed for some of the reduction in visitor numbers but Mr Rifai also said that the attitude that visitors will come flocking of their own accord was also to blame.
Domestically things are also looking bad as more Australians are choosing to holiday abroad rather than stay in Australia. Cheap international flights and a strong Aussie dollar have combined to make holidays abroad just as cheap as staying at home.
The Australian tourist industry is one of the major economic earners, yet for the year 2010/11 the Tourism and Transport Forum are predicting a negative trade balance of nearly $9 billion. That’s despite the huge advertising campaigns launched by Tourism Australia to entice both domestic and international holidaymakers to choose Australia.
Aussies heading abroad for their holidays have risen by 13% last year. There were more Aussies leaving Australia than there were international tourists coming in. The biggest group of international tourists were from New Zealand, with Britain coming second. The normally high-spending Japanese are staying away, their figures were down 23% in 2009 and are already down 15.8% this year.
Tourism Australia have not always been successful with their campaigns, with the “Where the bloody hell are you?” ads attracting criticism. However their latest “There’s nothing like Australia” campaign does appear to be popular, but we’ll have to wait for the tourism numbers for 2010/11 to find out if it has worked.
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