Australian backpacking is the pulse we watch to gauge the health of the industry worldwide
In this guest post, gapyear.com founder Tom Griffiths relects on the recent ATEC Backpacker and Youth Industry Conference and why Australia’s backpacking industry still leads the world.
Like most of the delegates I spoke to, I found the recent ATEC Backpacker and Youth Industry Conference extremely interesting and useful. It’s very easy in these current times to set a safe agenda to cater for an industry licking its wounds, who want to hear good news stories and see rainbows ahead.
The problem is that the backpacking industry is at the sharp end of the current tech revolution (and customer evolution as a result) that is turning everything we understand upside down and making for a very difficult climate to work in. In five years we’ll be running off platforms that haven’t been invented yet – which makes future-proofing our businesses a little tricky.
We don’t have the luxury of being able to sit back and watch change happen elsewhere. Change hits us first – the average 16-year-old now uses their xBox games machine to chat to mates and swap info/advice while they do their homework and are used to being represented by/hiding behind an online profile. In two years time this will be our customer, and their purchase habits will be 100 per cent different from those of last year. Scary times indeed.
We need to be able to react as a unit to ensure that we all keep up, stick together (don’t lose too many stragglers unnecessarily) and adapt to the current climate. If we get it wrong it will hit us where it hurts, with arguably billions of dollars at stake.
Questions over the future of backpacker jobs in Australia, and the current problems of the weak pound, may already have caused changes to our sector that may be hard to reverse.
Should Australia lose the perceived ‘guaranteed certainty’ felt by backpackers globally that they will be able to find jobs to fund travel, numbers will fall. Combine this with being one of the more expensive destinations on a round-the-world trip and ‘days in country’ might also fall. Arguably, this safety net (guaranteed job/money/affordability) that has underpinned the industry over the years might be on the way out.
The ATEC agenda addressed all this in a very honest way, as only the Australians know how. That’s why the backpacking industry in Australia leads the way globally. You are the pulse we all watch to gauge the health of the current and future market. The conference also proved that there is abundant talent, passion, experience, innovation and entrepreneurial ability within the Australian backpacker sector, which is key to being able to keep ahead of your customers and also to attracting fresh blood – the youngsters who will be the industry’s innovators and leaders of the future.
In my role I get to see the global picture and have been involved in discussions about trying to pull all the strings of the global backpacker market together in an attempt to unify all parties and move forward as one. The global youth travel market is allegedly worth mopre than $150 billion. How can we deliver growth to over $200 billion or prevent a slide the other way? The only way to do it is to have honest evaluation by cutting industry apathy and developing in-country and cross-sector co-operation. You are the one country that is achieving this.
Tom Griffiths, founder, gapyear.com
By Martin Lane · May 4th, 2010 at 9:59 am
Have your say