AFTA UPDATE

WELCOME to spring, and to all those fathers out there, I hope your Father’s Day weekend brought with it something nice on the present front.

I think Kmart and Big W may have sold out of undies and socks, but as they say, a gift is a gift.

I was very happy to participate in the Magellan Travel Group conference, which was held last week in Uluru.

The conference was a huge success and it was great to once again catch up with so many terrific Magellan members while on site at the Sails Resort.

Uluru was going off, as coachloads of tourists, both foreign and domestic, scrambled their way to get their last “walk” on Uluru.

With the walk closing next month, the interest level does appear to be more than expected, and in the end, the wonderful thing about Australia is, choice is something that is allowed, and it would definitely seem that plenty are making the choice to climb and do the walk.

For the record, I chose to abstain from the walk, and while this would be my ninth visit to Uluru in my life, I have in fact never walked upon it.

There is no judgment meant in these words, it is something that people want to do and as Australia can be good at, we will enshrine rules such that future generations will only ever be able to imagine what the walk might have been like, as it will be closed forever.

It provides an interesting topic of conversation at post-event drinks during a conference.

On a final note, I am really pleased that today (03 Sep) AFTA is hosting a Travel Skills Round Table in Brisbane (see right), and by doing this, we will bring together a large range of stakeholders from across the various retail travel networks, some of the larger TMCs and other parties to talk about how government-led skills settings should look and what shape they might take going forward.

As AFTA takes a much deeper role and leadership position on education and training directly, we will use this session as a first step in what may be a long road.

Similarly, the subject of careers in travel is appearing more and more in Q&As with members and this is again a topic that AFTA will be addressing going forward both from within the Govt funded arena, but also how to achieve the aim on a more practical level.

We will look at how we can bring industry together to tell the story and build out what is needed so that people of all ages know that travel is a place for a career and that there is a terrific future in a career in travel.

Stay tuned for this one, we have many new ideas emerging.