TTF Chief issues a warning to the tourism industry
Tourism Transport Forum Australia Managing Director Chris Brown said today that figures released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics for August showed a decrease of 4.3% in inbound passengers compared with the same time last year, coinciding with a 2.1% rise in the number of outgoing passengers.
Mr Brown said that while about 413,600 people passed through arrivals gates at international airports across Australia during the month, it compared with about 395,800 departures and that the figures should serve as a warning to the tourism industry to address the decline.
He said Tourism Australia’s focus on the Chinese and Indian markets was a positive move, but it wasn’t compensating for the drop in visitors from New Zealand, Europe and the United States, with Mr Brown praising the Federal Government and some State Governments for investing heavily in tourism while other States were not doing their bit to support the industry.
As reported in TravelMole a number of times and in an interview at ATE 2006 with Fran Bailey, the Federal Minister for Tourism, Mr Brown said that New South Wales, South Australia and the ACT have not yet made appropriate investments and are holding the national industry back.
In the interview with TravelMole, Minister Bailey described the NSW Government as “unbelievably arrogant at a Government level, because they think that they do not have to do anything, because they have Sydney and its icons and that does the job for them”, adding “I have been everywhere in NSW and all the regional tourism organisations in New South Wales are giving the same message, they are simply not getting the dollars and support from the NSW Government to market their regions effectively.”
A selection of the TravelMole reports and interviews can be viewed at:- https://www.travelmole.com/stories/110305.php?news_cat=&pagename=searchresult
and
https://www.travelmole.com/stories/109297.php?news_cat=&pagename=searchresult
A response at the time in TravelMole from John O’Neill, Director and General Manager of the New South Wales’ Government’s tourism agency Tourism New South Wales, claimed that the New South Wales Government and the other State Governments spent a larger percentage of their budgets on their State Tourism organisations than the Federal Government spends on Tourism Australia as a proportion of its budget.
Report by The Mole
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