Tour bodies dispute tourism figures, slam Tourism WA
- MICEBTN archive stories issue 26
- Friday, 19 January 2007
WESTERN Australia’s peak tourism organisation and major tour operators are at loggerheads over the state of tourism in WA.
This follows scathing criticism of the Tourism Western Australia by the WA Tourism Owners Group (WATOG), which has voiced its concern in an email to tourism chiefs over a number of issues.
WATOG claims that the marketing strategy and structure introduced by Tourism WA over the past year has failed.
In that time, WATOG says WA had a decline of 2.55 million bed nights and interstate, intrastate and international markets have all dropped.
“That is a massive 7.5 per cent loss in our market share compared with other Australian states and territories,” said WATOG. “This is despite significant increases in government funding to Tourism WA and despite reductions in funding to other state tourism bodies.
“These declines are part of an alarming trend over recent years.”
The email went on: “We feel strongly that all tourism owners and employers need a clear voice to government in order to bring about prompt changes that will benefit the whole industry and state.”
It pointed out that WATOG was not party political. It was aimed at:
• Ensuring that tourism owners have a clear voice.
• Maximising government accountability.
• Maximising the effectiveness of government activities.
• Encouraging tourism investment to grow employment.
In response, Tourism WA chief executive officer Richard Muirhead said he was aware of a “widely circulating email which contains selective, limited and, as a result, misleading information in regard to the state of tourism in WA”.
He said Western Australia was bucking the national trend of a contracting domestic market, while interstate visitors had jumped nearly 12 per cent in the past year —”but more importantly for the tourism industry ‘holiday and leisure’ visitors increased 25 per cent and ‘business’ visitors dropped three per cent”.
Muirhead added that while visitor nights had fallen as they had elsewhere in the country, expenditure was at an all-time high.
He said Tourism WA was constantly talking to and listening to industry representatives and individual operators in regard to the state of the industry and their businesses.
Muirhead said Tourism WA was interested in the views of all tourism operators and he was available to talk to them over the issues raised.
