How Cairns can capitalise on new work-from-home tourism market
Cairns is safe, connected, offers Zoom capabilities and opens up the possibility of living and working in the tropics for, say, a few months of the year, writes leading demographer Bernard Salt.
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In February 2020 I addressed 500 delegates at the Cairns Convention Centre where I talked about the outlook for tourism and especially with tourists from China.
I think it’s fair to say things have moved on.
Initially there was concern in Cairns about the local impact of fewer international visitors and students.
But as Australia cocooned itself off from the rest of the world and learnt how to work from home new opportunities opened up.
Indeed, to me, Australia, Cairns and Far North Queensland seem quite irrepressible.
Throw a global pandemic at this lot and there will be some businesses that manage to prosper.
This was the theme of some recent (commissioned) advisory work that I recently completed for US software developer ServiceNow where I scoped the future of work post-Covid.
Indeed the lessons from that job (now published and in the public domain) are transferable to tourism and to Cairns.
I regard work from home as the greatest social event to have impacted the Australian workforce since WWII.
Generally about 5 per cent of Aussies work from home; after lockdown this proportion could be 15 per cent or higher.
This uplift in WFH enables more than a million workers to live more or less wherever they like. Maybe even in Cairns and maybe just for a Melbourne winter.
This could never have happened without the full rollout of the NBN broadband network.
It has been a gamechanger during the pandemic.
We Victorians, for example, are already seeing the rise of the VESPAs (Virus Escapees Seeking Provincial Australia) scootering into the regions outside Melbourne.
But why stop at the Murray River? Why not keep going north?
Phoenix Arizona (pop 5 million) has ‘snowbirds’ who fly in from cold New York to winter in the desert sun; they can be retirees or older workers who have the capacity to dictate when and where they work.
Why can’t Cairns create and fill this kind of niche market in Australia?
But the pandemic’s prospects for Cairns don’t stop with old cold Southerners swooping in.
My ServiceNow work argued that the pandemic has accelerated digitisation of workflows, in the workplace and in everyday living.
Cairns is safe, connected, offers Zoom capabilities and opens up the possibility of living and working in the tropics for, say, a few months of the year.
Cairns and FNQ more generally have successfully competed for a share of the domestic visitor market (typically visits of 10 days or so) and are both regarded as a must-see destinations for internationals.
Imagine a world where Cairns eventually snaffles back much of these visitor markets, recoups the diminished backpacker market because, well, the Cairns box simply must be ticked by all backpackers apparently.
And then, added to this, we have the prospect of a new market cohort: Victorian (and other) VESPAs as well as other work-from-home types not so much looking to relocate, but who yearn to carry on Zooming amid the dappled light of the palm trees of the Northern Beaches. As you can see I have thought this through.
But we need a cool name and a marketing pitch to snare a share of the one million extra work-from-home types who might be tempted to Zoom from a room for a month or two in FNQ.
Somehow I think Cairns will be only too happy to create and ‘own’ a new post-Covid market of visitors/short-term residents not so much working from home but working from a tropical retreat.
Count me in Cairns!
Bernard Salt is executive director of The Demographics Group and cannot wait to get back up north
Originally published as How Cairns can capitalise on new work-from-home tourism market
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