Is this how we should be selling Australia? A scene from the 'There's nothing like Australia' tourism campaign.
Sir Richard Branson is mystified by Australian tourism's incompetence. The “brand” it has to sell used to be the world's perennial flavour of the month and still rates as one of the globe's most desirable places to visit.
But somehow we've stuffed it up, killed the goose that used to lay the golden eggs. Forget about the fast trains the rest of the developed world has that we can't organise or the fast broadband internet system the federal government is attempting to impose on an unwilling telco industry: we can't even organise a successful advertising campaign to attract tourists.
As the founder of a global airline, Virgin Atlantic, and mentor of Australia's second airline, Virgin Blue, Sir Richard Branson can't understand why Australian tourism isn't more successful.
“Australia's the country I most enjoy coming to,” Sir Richard said in a weekend interview with Business Spectator. “It's a fun country. It's pretty much got everything you could imagine to offer: great people, great variety, it's got the Gold Coast.
“You name it, Australia has it. So if they want to use me to plug Australia, I'd be delighted to do so because I can't think of another country I'd rather visit.
“I arrived in Australia yesterday, I'm going back home tomorrow and I'm going to be back here in two weeks' time and that's 24-hour journeys both times. So I'm sold and I think Australia's a very, very easy sell.
“I'm surprised that the advertising people can't get the message across.”
Branson isn't the only one wondering about Australia's recent underachievements in tourism.
The secretary-general of the World Tourism Organisation, Taleb Rifai, also weighed into the issue last week.
Rifai, a Jordanian, says Australia needs to ditch the "island mentality" that bred complacency and a misplaced belief that international holidaymakers will beat a path to its door.
"Australia has lived for a long time . . . happy with its isolation," Dr Rifai told News Limited media. "That's not going to work any more."
Rifai was a guest at the Tourism Futures conference in Sydney that examined what had gone wrong with Australian tourism and how it could recover.
The Tourism and Transport Forum (TTF) predicts that the negative balance of trade – the spending of Australians travelling abroad verses the spending of foreign visitors to Australia – for 2010-11 will approach a record $9 billion.
About 6.6 million Australians travelled overseas in the year to April this year, up 13 per cent and surpassing the 5.65 million international visitors to Australia.
This blog understands why that is the case and readers have told us loud and clear why holidaying in Australia has gone out of fashion among Australians, the main gripes being that everything is too expensive and the service is rubbish. I also have a long list of what is wrong with the local product.
What about the message for people who've never been here before and want to come? How would you be selling Australia? Is the current campaign, which encourages Australians to nominate their favourite places (“Australia. There's nothing like it.”), the right strategy?
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