Tourism Minister tells hoteliers how to run their businesses

Delegates to Golden Chain’s Annual Conference in Manly NSW last week faced being told how to run their own businesses by outgoing New South Wales Tourism Minister Sandra Nori, who challenged them to create new ways of attracting tourists to their locations in the face of a domestic tourism downturn.

Minister Nori told the 21st birthday conference that most western nations shared a downturn in domestic tourism and that all were trying to find new ways of addressing the problem, adding that the downturn had impacted countries such as New Zealand and the United Kingdom, with cheap international air fares combined with higher petrol prices having encouraged more people to travel internationally.

Providing what are believed by industry leaders to be even more excuses for the NSW Government’s ongoing failure to invest in tourism, with the industry believing that the multi million dollar slashing of the NSW Government’s tourism budget is a key factor in the decline, which is particularly severe in NSW, Ms Nori said work pressures had increased dramatically on people who were finding it increasingly difficult to take long breaks from their jobs, only to face a “mountain” of work on their return.

She added that this provided an opportunity for domestic operators to entice people to take more, shorter breaks at local destinations with Golden Chain, with its spread throughout Australia, had a major role to play in developing domestic tourism.

Ms Nori said, “People no longer want to simply arrive at a destination” and “What makes people want to stay an extra night?   Responding to her own question, she said, “It is immersion in the local environment, the local tourist opportunities, the local culture, the local experiences that can be offered by the area in which each of you is located.”

While the Minister said the Government had just launched a new series of Holiday Planners promoting local tourism that were designed to support and encourage local initiatives, she did not appear to offer any additional funds to assist regional operators to market their product and/or destinations, with some drought stricken locations finding business very hard.

Some Golden Chain delegates told the Mole that they were less than impressed with Ms Nori’s comments and that Tourism New South Wales and the New South Wales Government actually did little of real benefit to the industry or in particular Golden Chain or their businesses, with one delegate describing Tourism New South Wales as irrelevant to his business. 

Another delegate said, “Sandra Nori knows nothing or very little about running real businesses such as hotels or motels and the only valuable thing she could do is secure more funds to make NSW competitive with other States, which it clearly now is not, having fallen well behind everyone else.”

Report by The Mole