GROWTH DRIVE Industry leaders reflect on forum’s talking points
ness, leisure and freight – all of those components need to be humming at their absolute maximum.
How quickly will the new $3.8 million tourism funding package boost to the Far North be made available?
QAMark Olsen, TTNQ CEO: We have already signed the first contract for trade partners for a campaign to start on Friday – we reached out to our accommodation partners only yesterday, and Accor have doubled their support for our campaign over the next few months. You’ll see from the TTNQ campaign opportunities for individual operators to participate in, either through our drive campaign – which is Townsville, Mackay, Rockhampton short-break drives – or our interstate campaign over the next few days.
THE father of Queensland tourism, Sir Frank Moore, imparted some wise advice to the industry he loved after watching the Cairns Post’s Future Tourism forum.
“You can’t ever sit back and say, ‘Oh well, we’ve done a great job’,” he warned.
“Tomorrow, there’s a whole new set of problems.”
The seasoned tourism sage, who during his illustrious career chaired the Australian Tourism Industry Association and the Australian Tourism Research Institute, said he was in Cairns for about a week, “to listen, not to talk”.
He was in good company, with hundreds of businesspeople turning up to help drive the agenda for the Cairns and Great Barrier Reef region’s tourism future.
Stuart Duplock, chief executive of Dunk Island owner Mayfair Iconic Properties, said he was impressed with the event.
“I was really intrigued by the opportunities presented by the education sector to grow visitation into Cairns,” he said.
“I think the key thing that’s missing is room stock of varying kinds and additional infrastructure. We need to give tourists a reason to come here and a great experience once they get here.”
Reef Restoration Foundation co-founder Rob Giason was Tourism NSW marketing director in the 1990s when the organisation began its statewide education strategy.
He backed demographer Bernard Salt’s push for Cairns to boost international university student numbers.
“We saw exactly what he was saying with regards to the influx of visitors,” he said. “The other thing he didn’t say was that we also saw was a massive investment in property by parents of overseas student – because they put them in the properties.”
Former Cairns mayor Val Schier said the region needed to scale up its event offerings and points of difference.
“It really needs to grow its food tourism and those trails and people coming here just to eat all the things you can produce in the tropics,” she said.
Blazing Saddles operator Michael Trout was happy to learn new funding had come online but urged authorities not to waste it all on a domestic campaign right now.
“Everyone has just gone back to work, they’re paying off credit cards,” he said. “But longterm, to have that extra money on the table is excellent.”