PROFILE: James Goodwin CEO of Accommodation Australia

Just a few weeks into his new role, former Australian Airports Association head James Goodwin finds himself with similar challenges ahead in his new role as CEO of Accommodation Australia. He speaks to Travel Weekly about skills shortages, sustainability, luxury accommodation, cost of living, business travel, membership drives and champagne meetings.
He may have changed merry-go-rounds, but the challenges posed by planning regulations, workforce shortages and infrastructure delays seem to be following the former AAA head into his new role as AA CEO. See! Even the acronym hasn’t changed much. And while he might be dry, the easy-going Goodwin is always upbeat and doesn’t seem perturbed about taking on another role in an industry that needs a much-needed lift. It’s a bonus he is one of those guys who looks for solutions rather than identifying problems, especially now among more than 1000 properties he represents and the 100,000 or so beds within them.
“I think it’s an exciting opportunity,” he tells Travel Weekly of his new role. “And there’s really a buzz around travel and accommodation at the moment where people want to get back into this, whatever the new normal is…”
Precincts creating momentum
Among that buzz are the new precincts including The Star in Brisbane, and Barangaroo in Sydney, which have helped create that excitement. It’s not just about room keys.
“Precincts create their own momentum,” he says. “You’re not just building a hotel, you’re building part of a precinct which is generating its own tourism that goes with it, and the hospitality and the food and beverage, so those are the sorts of things.”
Talking of Brisbane, while it is planning for the 2032 Olympics, the rest of Australian tourism also has to be prepared, he says.
“You’ve made the effort to come to Australia, you’re not going to just stop at Brisbane. So that’s where everyone should be, leveraging off that and showing those unique opportunities, wherever they might be,” Goodwin says.
As for the challenges, the current building boom in Sydney is creating its own shortages for hoteliers, pitting private sector hotel accommodation builds against State Government projects such as the Metro, a network of road and rail tunnels, and the Western Sydney Airport to name a few. Those delays have also delayed planning permissions, pushed back project teams and squeezed labor supply.
In his first few weeks he has put in a submission around building environmental efficiency standards where the rules are the same for different hotel players.
“The concern there is that hotels, a lot of them, and pubs in the hospitality side, are often in heritage buildings,” he says. The quandary, he says, is that while they may be carefully restored and nurtured heritage hotels, the same energy-rating rules apply to them as to energy-efficient new builds, and company procurement guidelines may well require choosing a hotel that energy-efficient.
“(A heritage hotel) may not ever be able to get to the highest rating because of some of those other government regulations of planning or heritage,” he says.
“We want the most energy efficient because it’s good for business, but it’s also the right thing to do socially and environmentally as well. But there’s the hotel, although the same floor space might be the same as the office block next door, very different. There’s a toilet in every in every room… you’ll need the gas for the cooking and all of these sorts of things.
“The floor space might be the same, but the way the floor space is used and utilised is different. So we just want that understanding that a hotel is different, to say the equivalent multi-storey office block.”
It’s a red tape versus a white tape battle he says.
“The white tape is that another business is saying we won’t book at your hotel, or we won’t do business with you unless you have all of your ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) requirements, and you can tell us where that where that steak is cooked, or whether you where you got the building materials from, and all of those sorts of things.
“Businesses are also creating their own regulatory pressures and operating costs on each other, and that’s a fairly new sort of operating model in the last certainly five, but certainly maybe 10 years.”
Workforce shortage a chicken or egg issue
With occupancy rates at around 75 per cent in the capital cities and Gold Coast, up about 4 per cent on the same time last year, there is still room for increased capacity, he says.
“But if we want to increase the occupancy, we need the staff to go with it,” he says. And that is just in capital cities. Regional and remote destinations also face the challenges of meeting high visitor expectations but without the staff to support them with our visa system proving a difficult process to navigate. Similarly, he says “strike teams” that come into Australia to refurb hotels, or new management brought in to oversee change are not catered for either.
“Our visa and migration system doesn’t recognise that, doesn’t play that game,” he says. “Attracting and retaining staff remains an issue at the moment as well.”
To that end, AA is working on a platform to engage better with school leavers and job seekers to consider hotels and hospitality as a career, rather than a job. But more on that soon, Goodwin says.
Playing both sides of the political fence
While his role is national, various state projects mean he will be crossing paths on multiple levels of government, comparing the play to a chessboard where a federal rule will impact on a state project, and vice-versa.
“My main focus is really with the Federal and the National sort of approach. But you can’t do one without the other,” he says.
With a Federal election likely in the next few months, Goodwin also needs to double down on the conversations required, just to make sure both major sides of politics are covered.
“I’ve got to catch up quickly but it’s also a good time because it draws the focus, it narrows the focus,” he says.
His No.1 priority, though, is tourism, particularly international tourism with numbers still down 15-16 per cent on pre-Covid figures. But he says there are still some levers the Federal Government is able to pull to help, such as bilateral Air Services agreements, landing slots, and the like.
“The Chinese market hasn’t come back either,” he says. “We’ve got to look at that diversification in either new markets, but also growing some of those other markets.
“We really have to tell people we’re open for business, that we will support you with that,” he says “We’ve made it difficult for people in the past because of those regulatory rules (including) about how and when you can land in Sydney.
“But you don’t have to come into Sydney. There are alternatives and that’s probably not as well understood in those other markets.”

Travel Weekly editor Grant Jones, with James Goodwin (centre) at Travel Weekly’s 2024 Travel Daze conference in Cairns, and Christina Werkstetter of Aviation Partnerships at Sydney Airport.
Tech focus to the fore
While he’s no geek, Goodwin says technology, and AI in particular, has a bigger role to play in the accommodation sector, whether it is alerting casual staff or evening out check-in times.
While tech can gain a few percentage points in time and/or productivity that may not seem worth the investment for a hotel manager or hotel owner at present.
“But when that 3 per cent gain suddenly becomes five and then six and seven (per cent), that’s when you start getting economies of scale,” Goodwin says.
“I think we have to get cleverer in the way that we are managing the rooms and rostering and things like that,” he says. “I don’t think anyone is quite across it yet. You really need to understand the accommodation sector quite intimately and quite well to know how that’s going – how you can improve it.
“People writing the algorithms don’t yet know enough about the sector to know what they can do,” he says. “I need to join some of those dots.”
Business events are coming back
Goodwin says its catch-up time for business events as “we missed a bit of a cycle coming out of Covid”.
“We’re still concerned that the business traveller has not returned,” he says blaming the Zoom effect with business travellers reluctant to do a one-night stay and things like that.
“We’re getting into that rhythm now, and that’s very important for the midweek business-type travel,” he says. “(Conferences) will change a town or a city. In a regional, large regional city, one reasonably-sized conference could completely book out all the rooms. So it really will have an impact on the broader economy. But we have to make sure we are really still in the market.”
That means ensuring we have sufficient hotel rooms, airlines and the airfares are acceptable deal works.
Cost of living clips wings
While not quite pointing the finger at those connected to his former organisation, Goodwin says while hotel costs have risen marginally, airfares have not come down significantly from the major highs, post-Covid.
Revenge travel is still hot, and people want to splurge if they can afford it. They’ll splurge on getting a suite, they’ll take a spa, or a massage, and they’ll get nice room service, he says.
“Our concern is with that is, from what we can see, it’s not the accommodation costs that are the challenges, it’s the airfares. They’re very uncompetitive.”
The loss of Bonza and REX to capital cities has exacerbated the situation, as well as the signifcant loss of flights to regional markets.
“What we’re seeing with REX is perhaps business travelers are still booking, but there’s a reluctance for the ordinary consumer to be making a booking with REX a few months in advance. And that’s putting the whole ecosystem in jeopardy.”
“They are still operating. We should get that message out there. Don’t be afraid. But we can understand that confidence is being it’s been rocked.”
While he has plenty of ideas he’s not going to share them all at once.
“I will start bringing back some ideas or things that we can do differently,” he says. But at the moment it is alerting membership that he’s there to listen and learn.
But he is still getting used to the way business is conducted in his new role.
“Someone asked me the other day, ‘How’s the new job going? and ‘How’s it different?’ I said it’s different because I turned up for a meeting in the afternoon with some members, and we started with some champagne. That is hospitality. Not a bad way to start.”
Email the Travel Weekly team at traveldesk@travelweekly.com.au
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