Regional Tourism Community Awareness Campaign set to launch
The Shire of Strathbogie has partnered up with 22 other Shires and tourism associations from across Victoria to create and launch the '2008 Regional Tourism Community Awareness Campaign.'
To be screened by Prime Television across regional Victoria, the advertisement will be aired 136 times in mostly prime time slots over an 8 week period commencing Saturday 26th July.
According to Bernard Schaff the campaign aims to raise the awareness of importance of tourism to the fabric of Victorian regional and rural local communities.
"There's not a business in a country town that doesn't benefit from tourism either directly or indirectly," said Bernard Schaff. "General stores, post offices, pubs, accountants and mechanics…they all derive a portion of their income from tourism."
In 2007, 5 million domestic daytrip and overnight visitors spent a total of $986 million in the Murray region.
Further, our region hosted 50,500 international visitors overnight, representing 16% of all international overnight visitors to Victoria.
The visitors were directly assisted by the 7,059 people in the region who are employed in 5,910 tourism businesses, accounting for 5.0% of total employment throughout the region.
Yet, despite this, tourism faces challenging times ahead with fuel price increases, a tight labour and skills market and global warming set to create much uncertainty in the industry.
"Now's the time to really start talking the industry up. With so much negative publicity, it's easy to forget that regardless of what happens, people will still travel to our region, and we want to make sure we continue to benefit," said Bernard Schaff.
The campaign highlights other less known, intangible benefits of tourism too.
"There's no doubt that the Strathbogie communities get a huge buzz from knowing that they play host to visitors from across Victoria, interstate and even overseas," said Bernard Schaff. "We are by nature hospitable people and we derive a great deal of pride in their own community from tourism activity."
For more information: Marli Kelly 0409 410 178 - July 29, 2008
For details/interview call the Editor on (03) 5798 1858