Tourisms dirty little secret
A recent article in the Daily Telegraph by TTF MD Chris Brown says that tourism has a dirty little secret – Australia has lost its mojo and as the country’s biggest city and state, NSW and Sydney have been feeling the effects.
Overseas visitor numbers have gone up a paltry 1.9 per cent since the Sydney Olympics in 2000, a dismal effort compared to the global increase of 4 per cent.
Even our near neighbours are leaving us for dead, with Asia Pacific going gangbusters as a tourism region while first-time visitors to Australia have actually declined in the past seven years.
The NSW Government has learnt a tough economic lesson since the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000 – if you don’t market your state’s tourism assets, it doesn’t matter how magnificent your Harbour is or how successful your Olympics were, tourists just won’t come.
We spent millions upon millions of dollars on the Olympics, inviting the world to experience a sophisticated, vibrant city at the gateway to Australia, showcasing the best we had to offer.
But you can’t host an Olympics – even the best Olympics of the modern era – then sit back and expect the benefits to continue.
Just when we needed to boost our marketing efforts to maximise the buzz around the Games, the state’s Treasury boffins got busy slicing and dicing funding for tourism.
There’s been other challenges too – not least 9/11, Ansett and SARS – and more to come with rising fuel prices and climate change on long-haul travel.
It’s been disturbing watching Sydney “flatlining” for so many years. But yesterday, after years of silence, the NSW Government announced an additional $40 million over three years to promote the state as a tourism destination.
This is a watershed moment for the tourism industry in NSW and we need it make the most of it.
In NSW, that means developing Brand Sydney. Sydney is one of the world’s most iconic cities and NSW’s greatest tourism asset.
It must be promoted strongly as a destination in its own right if it is match up to New York, London, Paris, Toyko and, yes, Melbourne. We need to make Sydney sexy again.
We’re not capturing the attention of overseas travellers. And when we do, we need to make sure we’ve got the right experiences for them – we have some, but not enough.
Put simply, if you came to Sydney five years ago, what would be new for you to do if you came today? Nothing really springs to mind, does it? Believe it or not, BridgeClimb is now a decade old.
We need new hotels, new attractions, new theme parks and new natural tourism experiences in parks.
NSW’s share of international visitors to Australia dropped by 4.5 per cent between 2000 and 2007, while Victoria’s share jumped by more than 3 per cent.
To add insult to injury, Melbourne also last year overtook Sydney to become Australia’s most lucrative tourism destination, with domestic overnight visitors spending more in Bleak City than here in Sydney.
Christopher Brown is managing director of the Tourism and Transport Forum.
by The Mole
John Alwyn-Jones
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