(triumphant music)
- [David] Hi, I'm David Smith, manager of strategic research
and analysis with Tourism Research Australia.
We're actually a small but important part of Austrade
and that job is to provide national leadership
in tourism statistics.
Turning to Austrade more generally,
our goal is to boost national prosperity,
supporting the objectives of Australian
businesses seeking export opportunities
and facilitating more direct investment.
By international standards Australia
is still a very small country.
What I say geographically, we have a small, spread out
population and we're always challenged by the
economic powerhouses of Europe, Asia and North America.
But, as I'm sure you'll agree,
we're also a very smart country.
In a more connected and competitive world the service
we offer are critical in bringing international
business to Australia's door and strengthening
Australia's business environment,
and that's what is appealing about our challenge.
For the SME's involved our challenge is attractive
in three important ways.
First, it offers the opportunity for innovation.
Second, it has a very strong commercial potential.
Finally, you can make a real difference to our
tourism investment and policy environment.
There are of course many positive associations with tourism,
but at it's core, tourism is a very serious business.
To put this in perspective, it's our largest
service export by far, and currently it accounts
for one in 20 Australian jobs.
That figure stretches out to almost one in 12 when you
factor in indirect effects of tourism.
It's also out performing most other sectors of the economy.
In fact Deloitte called it one of Australia's
super gross sectors, it will drive new jobs and help
diversify our economy in the future.
This performance is fueled by a strong
investment pipeline, helping domestic demand,
and rapid international growth in competitive numbers.
Which is coming off the back of a surge in global middle
classes, open sky arrangements and falling air fares.
To thrive in this changing, challenging and growing
environment you need evidence insights
to support informed decision making.
This is particularly the case for investors.
For example, the cost of constructing a new resort or
five-star hotel can nearly run into the hundreds of millions
of dollars, and even if you're building a casino you
don't want to gamble on where to invest future growth
prospects of your local competition.
But our data isn't always suited to the needs of these
clients, many of them are based over seas
and lack that important local knowledge.
We do have some very good demand
site measures from our various tourism surveys.
This includes the National Visitor Survey covering
around 120,000 Australians each year.
And there's Internal Visitor Survey of around 40,000
departing over seas tourists.
Both of these surveys are long running, well regarded
data collections, but our supply site measures on
accomodation, labour, transport and investment only
reflect a subset of the visitor economy and fail
to capture the growing impacts of digital disruption.
In other words, the Air BnB, the Deliveroos,
the Ubers and the Airtaskers of this world,
plus the various platforms from which they operate.
Also, much the data is produced
lacks granularity and timeliness.
In fact it's essential to informed decision making in 2019,
and that's not going to go away soon,
demand and expectations for this level
of detail will only increase in the future.
These shortcomings also hamper the work of policy markers
and planners, for example, the Australian government
overseas long term tourism policies to better match
demand with supply though periods of rapid growth.
This includes the current tourism 2020 strategy
and new long-term strategy beyond 2020;
which is currently undergoing public consultation.
In implementing these strategies, government
wants a more detailed and accurate data on tourism
performance across Australia so they can see how industries
tracking against these strategic goals.
This will even make target interventions
and deliver better policy outcomes.
It also includes the monitoring of the growing impact
of sharing economy providers onto additional sectors.
For instance, there's a growth of Air BnB's in our cities
cannibalising business from the big providers
or is it providing a complementary service for example.
Perhaps opening up more trouble for Australians
and helping the accommodations take the better cope
with periods of peak demand and providing a more
customised accommodation experiences.
Operators also are seeking access to better data.
They need to stay to monitor their performance
relative to their peers, to identify areas of improvement,
and to give them the confidence to expand their operations.
There's also a keen interest in better
measuring the impact of major events.
So just to recap, we have a situation where government,
industry and operators have a thirst for more data
for a range of very different, but very important purposes.
In today's world of big data that's becoming more
of a expectation than an aspiration.
But the reality is a lack of accessible data means you
only get to see part of the story, and that skews the
decision making process as well as slowing it down.
Our challenge tackles these sort of issues head on.
If you remember nothing else from this presentation,
I would like you to take away three key words.
The first word is integration.
That means integrating big data from various transactional
systems with conventional data, such as surveys,
or integration supply slide data with demand slide data,
or bringing in new data on infrastructure or investments,
and population growth to create richer data sets that can
be analysed in detailed geographically and temporally.
So the challenge here will be identifying
and unlocking new data sources, and finding ways to work
with the owners of this data so we can
draw out their full potential.
There will also need to be some hard
known judgements around the cost of acquiring data,
privacy concerns and the data reliability.
These will be key outcomes of the feasibility stage.
Word number two is intelligence, So that's supplying
advance analytics to these integrated data sets
to look at the relationship between demand and supply
to produce meaningful metrics for industry and government.
So these are things like identifying areas
of pent up or growing demand, Identifying the range
of offerings in the area, and some predictions
around future growth prospects.
The third word is insights, so these are the insights
that come from integrating data and applying a layer
of intelligence for investors this includes
telling them who competitors are in a particular
location; telling them how their competition is
performing; and telling them what these competitors
are offering their target markets.
This will enable investors to make better choices
around particular sights knowing a bit more
about their competition will also help them in shaping
their particular offering so that they can
find their own niche in this market.
And just as importantly, it's about complementary
activities not just competitors.
So if you are looking to invest in a hotel,
then the fact that there's a large entertainment
precinct near by or major tourists attraction
under construction, then that could be
a real game changer in the projects viability.
Now this is an ambitious challenge naturally comes
with some risks, we're very cognizant of this and we'll
be addressing risk with a two-pronged approach.
Firstly during the feasibility stage, we would expect
the successful SME to work closely with myself and
colleagues at Tourism Research Australia.
To draw on their extensive experience in measuring tourism
and working with big data such as
credit card and mobile phone data.
That's really important as you'll need
sophisticated and clever algorithms to identify and extract
tourism activity from the masses of data generated
by these various sources.
At this stage it's also important
to note that we expect this product to evolve over time
as we gain access to new or better data.
So version one of what's produced might only look
at the accommodations sector for example,
but it will still be a valuable product.
Eventually though, we'd like to see it expanded
to include other parts of visitor economy and consider
broader resident populations as well as visitors.
Secondly, we recognise that to be successful
the end product needs commercial appeal.
That's why Austrade will collaborate and consult
within the industry, as well as drawing on the skills
of investment specialists to reach out to clients
both in Australia and overseas.
This will help the SME to better understand clients
expectations and requirements and includes things
like the way they'd like their day delivered.
The metrics they consider to be the most important
for their business needs and providing something
that they can relate to and that's easy
to use and to understand.
So thank you all for listening
and if you do have any questions please contact me
by the details on your screen.
(triumphant music)