In the wake of the recent federal budget, Tourism Australia has been forced to make wide spread cuts to it’s work force, confirming around 10 per cent have been made redundant.
A total of 20 roles from the agency’s marketing team based in Sydney were affected.
The shock move came as a surprise to many as a number recently worked at the Australian Tourism Exchange on the Gold Coast. The government attributed it to the, “the end of COVID-related additional tourism marketing campaigns as international travel resumed.
A spokesperson for Tourism Australia said the budget was confirmed as $169.1 million for 2023-24, well below the $208 million received the year previous, though still above pre pandemic numbers.
“With the return of international travel more than a year ago, Tourism Australia has continued to ramp up its efforts towards attracting visitors to Australia from overseas and rebuilding our visitor economy,” the spokesman said.
“Now with Tourism Australia’s budget confirmed for 2023-24 at $169.1m … we continue to work through how we best resource our business to maximise the opportunities to grow demand and convert that demand to visitation to Australia.”
Adding, “structural changes were being made to our Sydney operations which do involve some redundancies”.
Tourism Australia’s latest campaign, a $120 million video titled, “Come and say G’Day” was launched at the end of 2022.
Speaking at Cannes in Cairns, a three-day event put on by Travel Weekly’s parent company The Misfits Media that brings together the advertising, marketing, and PR industries, CMO, Tourism Australia, Susan Coghill said, “We support this incredible tourism industry that desperately needs international visitation to return.”
“It’s an industry made up of over 350,000 mostly small, mom-and-pop businesses that take out a second mortgage to buy boats to take you on a tour of the Murray River or up to the Great Barrier Reef.
“Tourism is our second-largest export. One in 12 jobs are tourism-related and here in Cairns, that number is one-in-eight.”
Speaking at the National Press Club on Thursday, minster for trade and tourism, Don Farrel said the tourism economy would, “continue to be a driver of Australian prosperity.”
