Is Tourism New South Wales setting a new agenda?

Tourism New South Wales spent some of what they say are their very scarce funds and limited marketing budget yesterday in a rather grand and slick Star City Sydney seminar telling the state’s trade what a great job the agency had been doing over the last couple of years, but more importantly that business was improving and that the State was now beginning to perform as the industry would expect.

With a new Chair in the form of recognised and dynamic industry leader Les Cassar, also Chair of TTF Australia, plus the appointment of Denis Pierce, MD of leading inbound operators ATS Pacific as Deputy Chair and the appointment of new Board members Russell Balding, CEO of Sydney Airport and highly experienced outbound tourism specialist Helen Wong, perhaps the TNSW tide is turning at least around the Board table.

Unfortunately, it appears that the State Government does not have the same financial commitment, with no additional dollars on the table for marketing tourism, with the industry yesterday bombarded in the slick and certainly very expensive presentations with phrases including, “we want to work in partnership” and “we have excellent marketing opportunities” and in the TNSW context, read, “we want your money”! 

Now The Mole might sound cynical, but it was the trade yesterday that made it clear in the post event discussion over drinks that they were not convinced, with TNSW’s performance over recent years said to have been lacklustre and all the presentations in the world not making up for that. 

One industry leader said, “We have heard all this before, had all the big presentations and the ‘we are great’ and the ‘aren’t we doing so well’ powerpoints, but the truth is that NSW is lagging far behind the other states.”   

Another operator added, “They also use these big number stats of how much they spend, but when you analyse that the spend and often the benefit is over several years, it is all actually a lot less than it appears to be.”

Another added, “These presentations are all great, but the truth is that the NSW Government’s investment in tourism is pitiful and everything TNSW does involves me spending money with them to make it work.”  “I wish my business was in Queensland as Sydney and NSW are stuffed, mainly because the Government does not understand the value of tourism marketing and development to the State.”

The hot topic at the session which was attended by 350 people representing 168 operators and organisations and a bucket load of TNSW staff, was the forthcoming end of September release of the review by recently reappointed ARU CEO John O’Neill of TNSW and Government in tourism in New South Wales.

With the recently released John O’Neill Major Events review considered by delegates to be rather a damp squib, with little information available and only $85million allocated over three years to attract major events, way less than any other major state competitor, the consensus yesterday was that the industry does not hold out a great deal of hope for O’Neills tourism review to create any major changes in TNSW or allocation of additional funding, which was equally the consensus of what needs to happen to get the New South Wales tourism industry going again.

Others were more optimistic with Les Cassar’s appointment in particular appearing to offer the industry some hope that the Government will allocate the serious funding that tourism requires and that TNSW will undergo the radical organisational and mind set change the industry says it needs.

With Sandra Nori, who by industry consensus is believed to have done very little or nothing for tourism in the State, now a distant memory, it was clear from industry comments yesterday that the honeymoon is pretty well over for new Tourism Minister Matt Brown, who appears to be heading towards saying the right things, but in reality in his first major trade presentation said very little to convince the industry that things were going to be any different or even better under his watch compared to under Sandra Nori’s, during which the consensus being that tourism wallowed around with nobody at the helm.  Again the proof for of the pudding for Minister Brown is………….!

CEO and GM of TNSW John O’Neill claimed collective success for the industry in his presentation and in an exclusive interview with The Mole, said, “For the first time ever, for the months of April and June www.visitnewsouthwales.com received more traffic than Queensland Holidays and this is a first in history.”

When questioned by The Mole why the approach demonstrated in the presentation should work, when earlier activity appeared to have been rather unimpressive, John O’Neill said, “What we have done today is report back to industry and demonstrated the fruits of three years of labour in the form of that we said back in 2003 and early 2004………we have a new approach in the way the State is being promoted and that we will be marketing it as a sum of its parts.”  “You might say every little piece of New South Wales and we should not be embarrassed to recognise that the Victoria has done very well with their campaign and we have learnt from that.”

“We also needed to make our relatively scarce resources go as far as possible, so we created an ad for Sydney in mid 2004, then one for Heart of Country later that year and newly created TV ads for the other parts of the State the following year.”

“We then commenced the production of high quality holiday planners and completed that roll out by the end of last year and that was followed by our bringing our digital process up and beyond industry best practice.”

“I said at the time that I did not expect anyone to trust or believe, us but that I wanted the trade to watch us and judge us as we went forward to see if we did what we say we would do.”

“What we were really doing today was reporting back and saying we believe that we have done the things that we said we would do and we have done them in partnership with you and also that we have been innovative in bringing big new powerful partnerships to the table, showing you how all this has come together and where the opportunities exist in the coming years, to really leverage what we believe is a powerful platform and our expert services.”

When asked if the activity to date had translated into increased visitation, John O’Neill avoided responding by saying, “I think that they are certainly reflected by the audiences we talk to telling us about their response to the work that we are doing, but there are a lot of factors between what a Government tourism organisation does and the decision to visit, with in a $23b economy, we are not by any means the dominant component.”

He did add though, “We have seen more visitors to New South Wales from international markets than ever before and they have stayed longer and we have seen for the first time in six years an up-tick in domestic visitation to New South Wales.” 

“We do not suggest that the challenges are solved and we do not take full credit and neither do we take full responsibility for either the good or the bad news in marketing tourism in New South Wales, but we hope that the industry can see that we are playing our part and giving them good value for the taxpayers money invested in us.”

Les Cassar Tourism New South Wales’ new Chair said he was looking forward to the challenges his new role presented and that while he believed TNSW had always been a good agency, it now needed to change with the times, adding, “NSW is the poor spending cousin compared to other states and we need to prove to Government that more funding will bring more business”.

As the industry says, the proof of the pudding…………………………..!

Report by The Mole