Cafe Society: Finding solutions to Tasmania’s tourism conundrum

If we want to be an island with relatively low visitation, how do we maintain that sweet spot? And how do we do so without alienating visitors and driving the crucial tourist dollar elsewhere?

Dr Anne Hardy is a tourism academic whose insights are in global demand, but her formula for a sustainable tourism industry in Tasmania is simple.

We need to give visitors meaningful experiences while keeping locals onside, says the University of Tasmania associate professor of tourism and society.

We can do that by clarifying our values and vision, consistently aligning our decisions with them, and ensuring the benefits of tourism are more widely shared in the community.

“We have the chance to position and brand ourselves as a state that protected itself,” says Anne when we meet at Bellerive’s Gastown East restaurant.

“It is about understanding what is important to us, deciding what we want to present Tasmania as, and protecting that. Within the parameters of change, which is a given, what do we really want to be known for?”

If we want to be an island with relatively low visitation, how do we maintain that sweet spot, she asks. And how do we do so without alienating visitors and driving the crucial tourist dollar elsewhere?

Anne thinks introducing a tourism levy would help the cause. She is talking about a modest, one-off visitation payment of the kind rejected by Premier Will Hodgman and Tourism Industry Council of Tasmania chief executive Luke Martin last year, but supported by Hobart Lord Mayor Anna Reynolds.

“I know this is a really unpopular idea within the tourism industry, but I am saying let’s charge a palatable amount, say $100, to get into this amazing state,” says Anne.

Income would be invested in future prosperity measures, including stronger Tasmanian branding, environmental care and helping young Tasmanians get a good start.

Tourism academic Dr Anne Hardy at Gastown East in Bellerive. Picture: NIKKI DAVIS-JONES

“I think a levy could give more people in the state the sense that they are being protected and looked after [through tourism], particularly if the money doesn’t go straight back to the Government, but goes into a fund for these outcomes,” says Anne.

She would reserve a portion to help tackle seasonal employment challenges in the tourism industry, with the aim of providing more stable, year-round jobs.

“We have fluxes. It’s flattening out now with festivals, and we are already investing money in dealing with that [winter lull], but there may be a way a levy can help there, too.”

Aligning our core values with our tourism values is critical every step of the way, she says.

Not only will that approach sustain the Tasmania we know and love, it will give tourists what they are after.

In a nutshell, that is us and a taste of our way of life.

How can we share that specialness in a way that doesn’t end up diminishing it for us — or them — but contributes positively to our communities and allows us to stay true to who we are?

Anne says these are key questions for general discussion.

And she says the Airbnb phenomenon has lessons for traditional tourism operators that remain relevant today.

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The first of these is to embrace the change — resisting an enormous, disruptive movement such as this is pointless. Instead, focus on understanding why Airbnb took off and learn from it.

“The traditional tourism industry was not providing a sense of an authentic experience,” says Anne. “People were saying ‘I don’t want to stay in a boring old hotel’. So we need to ask what we can do in our traditional forms to provide what the tourist today is valuing.”

A core part of Anne’s work is collecting, analysing and sharing tourism data well beyond academia. She is co-leader of the Tourism Tracer project, launched here in 2016 and recognised worldwide as a highly innovative and extensive tourism travel research project.

The pioneering program tracks the travel of sample visitors via an app installed on their mobile devices with their permission. Ground-breaking in its accuracy, in its first two years of operation in Tasmania Tracer produced significant statistics that contradicted both conventional wisdom and findings gleaned from regular visitor surveys.

“We now have a much better and detailed understanding of how and where different segments of people travel, the distances they travel, and which ports of arrival drive visitation into regions,” says Anne.

“I don’t care what Tasmania is selling for itineraries. Let’s look where people are actually travelling in the state.”

She says the technology, now commercialised by local IT firm Ionata Digital, is a great fit with the emerging Smart Cities movement, which responds in a design and management sense to human movement data that goes well beyond tourism.

One thing the data can’t solve, though, is differing opinions on our tourism future. Not without clear values-driven goals underpinning a constructive dialogue, anyway

“If we knew where we were going we would not be fighting over single issues such as the[proposed kunanyi/Mt Wellington] cable car,” she says.

“We need to have this discussion of what we actually want as a whole state.”