Australia top country at World Travel Market
A report by AP says that Australia has retained its crown of best country brand at the world’s largest travel fair, The World Travel Market 2007, which opened in London last week with a strong focus on green issues, highlighting the ever-increasing pressure on the tourism industry to promote environmentally friendly ways of seeing the world.
Other trends identified at this year’s Market included the rise of Halal tourism in the Middle East, the role of mobile phones in revolutionising the Asian travel industry and the growth of “voluntourism.”
Algeria and Libya were tipped as new travel hotspots, while Australia retained its crown as the world’s top country brand for the second year running.
Organisers of the four-day gathering in London’s Docklands business district, attended by tourism officials, government delegations, tour operators and airlines from more than 200 countries, put the focus squarely on the promotion of sustainable tourism.
The conference hosted a UN World Tourism Organisation summit on climate change ahead of the launch of the UNWTO’s World Responsible Tourism Day.
Organisers handed out responsible tourism awards, and a panel discussion on whether wildlife tourism in India can save the tiger is just one of many green-themed talks.
Among other trends for the industry, a Euromonitor International report highlighted the potential for a boom in Halal tourism in the Middle East, where it forecasts 66 per cent growth in inbound tourists by 2011 to 55 million people.
Clement Wong, travel and tourism research manager at Euromonitor International, said that a large proportion of those visitors will be intra-regional travellers, encouraged in part by the difficulty of obtaining visas for Western Europe and the United States.
The report also identified the use of mobile phones in Asia in the tourism industry as a potentially explosive trend that could eventually be exported to the United States and Europe.
Mobile phones have penetrated Asia-Pacific markets more than the internet, opening up access to lower-income consumers because of low-cost monthly packages.
Wong added that North Africa is to become one of the world’s tourism hot spots, with Libya and Algeria the latest countries predicted to have the potential to share in the boom that neighbouring countries such as Morocco, Egypt and Tunisia are enjoying.
Australia was at the top of a separate Country Brand Index by FutureBrand, followed by the United States, Britain, France and Italy.
The FutureBrand survey tipped Croatia, China and the United Arab Emirates as the three “top rising stars,” or those that will become major tourist destinations in the next five years.
The FutureBrand reports also highlighted another emerging trend, so-called “voluntourism,” where tourists plan their trips around humanitarian purposes.
A Report by The Mole from AP
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