Is Our Advertising Driving The Poms Away?

Australian tourism is taking a bit of a hit, and you can't blame it all on the strong Aussie dollar. The Poms started deserting these shores about the time Lara Bingle put on her bikini and asked "where the bloody hell are you?" Yet, despite repeated crises, the rest of the world isn't doing too badly at grabbing the tourist dollar. So what are we doing wrong?
Statistics from the ABS show that overall travel to Australia has flat lined for the last three years and grown just 9 per cent over the last nine. According to the World Tourism Organisation (pdf) there was a 33 percent increase in tourist arrivals globally from 2003 to 2008, but we seem to have missed the boat.

On a recent interview on BTalk Matthew Hingerty from the Australian Tourism Export Council said the Lara Bingle campaign had been a success in markets like the UK and the US, but I find it hard to see the case. Tourist arrivals from the UK have fallen 13 percent since 2004 --- its share of total inbound arrivals for Australia slid from 15 percent to just below 12 percent. All this from a market boasting 30 percent or more annual growth in the days when Hoges was throwing shrimps on the barbie.

The demise of the UK market has little to do with the strength of the dollar. It's certainly impacted the early part of 2010 but for most of the last six years a Brit would get around $2.50 to the pound. Australia's share of the UK outbound market was plummeting even when the dollar was weakening back in 2005.

We can't blame a declining outbound tourism market from the UK either. The Brits might have slowed their desire to travel in 2009, but overseas trips grew by more than 20 percent in the four years before that. Over that same period visits to Australia fell by 8 percent. Perhaps the prospect of their husbands meeting a Lara type on a deserted Aussie beach was too much for the target market middle-aged Brit to take. The more up-market follow-up "Australian Walkabout" campaign in 2008 sought only to reduce further Australia's share of the UK outbound tourism market.

Fortunately the US has fared slightly better. We've seen 11 percent growth over the last five years, raising their share of the inbound market from 8.3 percent to 8.6 percent. The advertising worked there it seems although, in reality, these figures see Australia only just holding its share of a slowly growing overseas travel market from the US.

I'm sure the defence from tourism types will be that Britain is now a saturated market and all the growth potential is in Asia. Yet Brits make nine times as many trips to North America as they do to Oz --- surely that indicates there's plenty of potential for growth.

So what about the latest campaign? Will it help save the day? Well maybe. As a pom myself I can vouch for a love of all things Monty Python and you'd have to say, it does have a touch of the Flying Circus about it! Is that Eric Idle on the piano?

Data Sources: UK outbound travel data US outbound travel data Australian inbound travel data Exchange rate data