Chief Executive Officer's Report

Annual Report 2013-14

With a solid return to growth in domestic tourism across Australia, Tourism Tasmania is now well placed to secure a sustainable future for our industry and increased economic prosperity for the state. Anticipating this rebound in visitation, we've put in place initiatives to harness this return to growth and secure the long-term sustainability of our industry.

Previous changes within Tourism Tasmania have seen us realign our service delivery to better focus on marketing the state; we've reassessed our approach to our international markets to ensure they provide the best return on investment and we've taken a new approach to domestic marketing that takes full advantage of our new tourism brand and the power of word-of-mouth to promote the destination.

Our four regional tourism organisations are also now well established and all have destination management plans ready to guide their activities, enabling a more coordinated approach to regional marketing and industry engagement.

Building on these strategies, this year saw us launch our redeveloped travel website Discover Tasmania. The new website is optimised for tablet and mobile and shows potential travellers how easy it is to holiday in Tasmania. Containing a wealth of easily accessible information on Tasmania, it also makes innovative use of third-party endorsement to promote the state.

The redeveloped website is just part of our broader digital strategy – one that will take a more targeted approach to the distribution of marketing content. As part of this new approach to content distribution we aim to grow our databases and social networks to build closer relationships with people interested in engaging with Tasmania and inspire them to book.

And we're putting greater effort into acquiring and sharing content on Tasmania with a range of commercial and aviation partners including Qantaslink, Virgin, Jetstar, Tiger and Flight Centre to give them the content they need to successfully promote the state.

Our increasing emphasis on content sharing with partners is also evident in the international arena, where we've been working closely with Tourism Australia on their Restaurant Australia campaign to ensure Tasmania's great food and drink experiences are well promoted overseas. International eyes will be on Tasmania in November when the campaign's closing event - Invite the World to Dinner in Australia - will see 80 of the world's most influential food and wine media and celebrities, converge on Hobart for a final gala dinner at MONA.

The coming year will also see us extend our activity in the domestic-based international sector, especially with youth, education and their visiting friends and relatives and we will continue to extend our domestic marketing effort into Queensland, a relatively untapped market for us.

With this solid foundation in place and more to come, I'm confident we can successfully meet our long-term goal of driving demand for Tasmania and securing successful economic outcomes for the state.

John Fitzgerald
CEO, Tourism Tasmania

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