Queensland tourism identity retiring after 22 years
He’s outlasted six prime ministers, four premiers and a global pandemic, but now one of the state’s most well-known tourism industry names is hanging up his hat.
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They call him Mr Tourism.
Through cyclones, floods, a certain pandemic and any number of other challenges, Daniel Gschwind has stood firm as chief executive officer of the Queensland Tourism Industry Council.
While Tourism and Events Queensland is the state government-funded body behind the glitzy ad campaigns and promotions you see on TV and social media, QTIC is the industry’s peak lobby group and Gschwind has been its longest serving CEO.
In fact, he’s been its only CEO, taking the reins when the organisation was formed in the year 2000 with a total staff number of two.
Now, 22 years later, with QTIC boasting a membership of more than 1000 tourism operators and 15 full-time staff, Gschwind, 65, is stepping down.
Queensland Tourism Industry Council CEO Daniel Gschwind announces retirement
He has been at the helm for six prime ministers, four Queensland premiers and too many tourism ministers to count, serving as an invaluable advocate for an industry which has been through its share of stormy weather – both figuratively and literally.
Gschwind will finish up on Friday, with former Brisbane Marketing boss Brett Fraser to take the reins. He has big shoes to fill, for while Gschwind has spent most of his career in the holiday business, the job itself is no holiday.
From press conferences talking up hotel booking numbers to high-powered lunches with tourism developers, early-morning phone calls from government execs on new industry support measures, not to mention how often he has wound up in far-flung corners of the state like Cooktown or Winton or Eromanga to inspect or open new tourism developments.
Looking into the skeletal jaws of a ferocious dinosaur in outback Queensland, it’s fair to say it’s probably not where Gschwind thought life would take him.
The story starts 15,000km from the dusty deserts of Birdsville, and even further from the underwater wonderland of the Great Barrier Reef, in the landlocked European nation of Switzerland. And we wouldn’t even be telling this story at all if a Gold Coast backpacker hadn’t ditched a Contiki tour and ended up in a bar in the Greek islands.
Born in 1957 in the village of Therwil, near the city of Basel in German-speaking Switzerland, Gschwind was the youngest of four boys to parents Walter and Emmy. Therwil is not in the shadows of dramatic mountain peaks, but it is a pleasant place, a small town surrounded by gently sloping hills with fresh country air. Its natural beauty was probably part of the reason why locals, including a teenage Gschwind, campaigned so strongly against a planned nuclear power plant.
He was never arrested – though there were plenty of protests and plenty of tear gas – and the plant was never built.
After finishing school he set off for adventure with a friend, hitchhiking from Switzerland to Indonesia.
“I was always interested in travelling, always interested in what was over the horizon,” he recalls.
While Switzerland’s compulsory military service drew him home, the travel bug had well and truly bitten.
The following year he took off to the Greek Islands for what was supposed to be a three-week holiday. He didn’t go home for three years, working on sailing ships and charter yachts.
“It was a great lifestyle,” he says.
It also led to the ultimate sliding doors moment, a one-in-a-million romance almost inconceivable to today’s generation of digitally-connected millennials. On a break between journeys, Gschwind stopped at a bar on the island of Spetses at the same time as a Gold Coast backpacker named Sheridan Hope, who had just ditched her European Contiki tour. “It nearly didn’t happen,” he recalls.
“She went back to Athens and I had to stay on the island and it was pre-mobile phones and all I knew was her first name and the name of the hotel she was going to be staying at.
“Then one day I decided I would go to Athens to surprise her and she wasn’t there and they said she had already left.
“I was totally devastated and the next day I was going to go back to the island on the ferry and I happened to walk past a hotel and there she is, sitting on a suitcase crying.
“She had thought she would go to the island to surprise me and she got told I had already left.
“It was just pure luck that we happened to run into each other again in the middle of this big city like Athens.
“It was as if it was scripted. It was clearly love that was meant to be.”
For the next six years they maintained a relationship – mostly by long distance – before Gschwind decided he would move to Australia permanently after their fairytale wedding in the snow at a ruined Swiss castle on the outskirts of Therwil in 1986.
Sheridan is a retired counsellor and the couple has three children; Anais 35, a training coordinator at Elements of Byron resort, Ben, 31, a horticulturalist in Stanthorpe, and Cassidy, 28, an IT business owner in Brisbane.
Queensland was initially something of a culture shock for the mild-mannered European, who enrolled in an economics degree at the University of Queensland.
“It wasn’t so much the weather, I liked the weather, but I was a bit taken aback that there were no outside cafes, the river was practically inaccessible, the ocean was nowhere to be seen,” he remembers.
“But thankfully, within a relatively short period of time, Expo 88 came along.
“And people said ‘hang on, we want this stuff all the time’, and that’s what started to happen.
“Cafes started popping up, more started to happen with the river – though it is still a bit of a work-in-progress.”
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After graduating from university, Gschwind became an economic advisor under the Goss administration for several years until he came across a job ad in the classifieds pages of The Courier-Mail.
“There was a tourism organisation looking for a policy manager,” he says. “I looked at the ad and I said to Sheridan: ‘I think this is my job’.”
The organisation was the Tourism Council of Australia, which was looking to hire in its Queensland branch.
The TCA was a national lobby group, which at one point had an ambitious young Scott Morrison as general manager.
However, two years after the departure of the future PM, the council “unceremoniously and very suddenly” went into voluntary administration in the year 2000, three days before Christmas.
Gschwind was left jobless – but not for long.
Some influential Queensland tourism leaders, including then-CEO of Tourism Queensland Stephen Gregg, banded together to create an effective replacement and a short time later Gschwind was hired as CEO of the organisation with a staff of two.
“We started off with nothing but good intentions,” he says.
Gregg, who was in 2015 given a lifetime achievement award for services to Queensland tourism, says Gschwind had all the attributes they were looking for in the search for a new industry statesman.
“He was very genuine – you could trust him with your bank account,” he says.
“He avoided unnecessary conflict, but he would still argue very strongly for how an issue should be handled.”
Former Queensland tourism minister Kate Jones came to know Gschwind well during her six years in the portfolio and says his departure will be a huge loss for the industry.
“To me he was always Mr Tourism,” she says.
Most of Gschwind’s career passed by beyond the watch of everyday Queenslanders, but that all changed a little over two years ago when reports of a new virus in the Chinese city of Wuhan began appearing on news bulletins.
Beyond the death tolls around the world, the virus left commerce decimated and few industries felt the impact of unprecedented global travel bans like the travel industry.
Queensland’s tourism sector lost thousands of workers, some of whom have been lost to the industry forever. At one point it was estimated a third of Queensland’s tourism businesses would go broke. The numbers so far have not been quite so drastic, but there is no doubt Covid-19 has rocked the industry to the core.
Early in the pandemic, experts predicted it would take Queensland’s tourism industry two years to recover.
Now that prediction is closer to a decade.
But Gschwind says the industry is well-placed in the recovery with the ability to bounce back from adversity firmly implanted in the DNA of Queensland tourism operators.
“There have been a succession of catastrophes, both man-made and natural, for the industry,” he says.
“The Global Financial Crisis, SARS, we’ve had cyclones, floods, bushfires, we had the Gulf War, 9/11, airline collapses.
“We have had some doozies over the years and that builds a kind of natural resilience in the industry I suppose.”
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QTIC went into overdrive during the pandemic, lobbying governments for support payments and programs while also working to develop industry frameworks for the resumption of business under social distancing guidelines, a task which threw up the kinds of questions Gschwind never thought he would have to answer (any takers on how social distancing works on a hot-air balloon or charter dive boat?).
And Gschwind became a recognisable face in the news, appearing at dozens of media conferences to the point he is now stopped in the aisles at Woolworths.
“They ask where is a good place to camp in Mackay, or why are there still travel restrictions, or why can’t we travel there?” he says.
“I’ve had people insist I should change the date of Easter because it was extremely inconvenient.
“I think they vastly overestimate my powers.”
It’s said with a wry smile from a man whose Twitter account name (thattourismguy) suggests he knows only too well where he sits in the spheres of fame and fortune.
The pandemic was his greatest challenge, with QTIC in a constant battle to lobby for government support, even after the Feds cut off the JobKeeper lifeline more than a year ago.
It spelt the end for some tourism operators who had been grimly hanging on throughout the first year of the pandemic despite lockdowns and minimal visitor numbers.
“For the first year we kept thinking it couldn’t get any worse and then it did,” says Gschwind.
“There were some very distressing phone calls (with business owners), more than we have ever experienced here.
“The first thing you have to do as an organisation is be there and reach out and listen, and even if you can’t offer a remedy at least you have to be empathetic and give some sense of direction.”
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While the pandemic took a terrible toll on so many in the tourism industry, Gschwind says it isn’t why he is standing down.
“There was never any question of walking away or giving up,” he says.
“I would not have wanted to leave in the middle of this.
“But I think now, finally, we can see light at the end of the tunnel and a way out.”
His view is supported by statistics, with the Easter period generating a multibillion-dollar economic windfall of the kind not seen since before the pandemic.
Figures from Tourism Research Australia also show Queensland’s tourism industry withstood the pandemic better than any other state, with the state rising from No.3 to No.1 in visitor expenditure last year.
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Gschwind is adamant he’s not “retiring retiring” and will stay involved in the industry.
He’s on the board of Tourism Whitsundays, but has no immediate plans for a full-time gig.
And maybe, after more than two decades spruiking the virtues of tourism, Gschwind might just disappear for an extended holiday of his own.
He’s earned it.
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