Tourism operators call for $7m help
Canberra Times reports that ACT tourism operators are calling for a $7 million promotion boost for Canberra to counter the effects of rising fuel prices and interest rates.
The ACT accommodation sector says the National Gallery of Australia’s recent Monet to Turner exhibition shielded Canberra from an impending downturn in visitor numbers.
The ACT Government’s Ministerial Advisory Council has applied for a $3 million injection of funding for strategic marketing and research.
The head of the council, David Marshall, said Canberra had to compete with the likes of Queensland, which had received an extra $4million to help the industry respond to airlines’ reduction of services to the Sunshine State.
”With rising interest rates, people are cautious: they will not make impulse decisions to travel to Canberra,” Mr Marshall said.
The Australia Hotels Association’s ACT general manager, Steven Fanner, said $4 million was slashed from the ACT’s tourism budget in 2006 and it would take 18 months to two years for this to hit home because promotional work had been done ahead of time.
”For about a year there was almost no noticeable affect on our members. But from the start of this year occupancies started dropping away a bit.
”Most of the hotels are expecting the second half of this year to be quite a bit down [compared] to last year.”
Mr Fanner said blockbuster exhibitions such as Monet to Turner were the single biggest driver of leisure tourism and the sector was lucky the National Galley would present Degas, Master of French Art in December, which promised to be an even bigger drawcard.
Mr Fanner said that, since the budget cut and the opening of three new hotels Diamant, Realm and Clifton Suites on Northbourne the number of hotel rooms in the ACT had increased by 25 per cent.
”We’d like to see more money put back into tourism, not only to take us back to the funding levels of two years ago.”
The rest of Australia had moved forward in tourism promotion and it was time the ACT did the same, he said, with targeted campaigns in regional NSW and Sydney.
Demand for accommodation was erratic and from now until December would be a testing period.
The president of the Canberra Accommodation Association, Mark Sproat, said his organisation’s 28 small operators were independent of large hotel chains and more vulnerable to funding cuts.
Gains from the See Yourself In Canberra campaign had been squandered through lack of recent funding and it would take from $6million to $7 million to restore that awareness.
People probably didn’t realise the extent of the damage so far. ”Nothing went wrong, but gradually you slip from people’s consciousness. We are not in the front of their minds: we become the 10th or 11th destination that they think about.”
ACT Tourism Minister Andrew Barr said higher fuel prices were among the challenges facing Australian tourism and the ACT market was not immune.
He said a continued rise in international visitors was encouraging.
A Report by The Mole from The Canberra Times
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