It’s all about travel confidence: Penny Lion

Head of Tourism Australia’s business events unit, Penny Lion, says the organisation is monitoring consumer travel habits nationally to help guide them on greater international marketing efforts in the MICE sector, including in Southeast Asia.

Traditionally, Tourism Australia — with its consumer travel focus — had done the “heavy lifting” for the MICE division, Business Events Australia (BEA), which has been running research of its meeting and incentive travel customers globally over the past 12 months.

With the launch of the Trans-Tasman bubble, they are monitoring travel activity across the ditch, and talking to meeting and incentive travel planners in New Zealand to ascertain when group travel may resume.

From initial results, it won't be in 2021.

“Our relationships with key customers are pivotal to helping inform our strategy [which is why] we held a customer advisory panel with some of our key clients in New Zealand just before the Trans-Tasman travel bubble opened,” Lion said.

“We said to them,`Let’s assume the borders are going to open what do you expect to see from Australia?’

"And they said, `We’ve been operating business events for a number of months because of how well New Zealand has handled the pandemic, we’ve locked in a lot of [domestic] business for the next six to 12 months so we don’t expect to see a lot of business rushing over to Australia.'"

Lion appreciates that honesty. "They are saying that it’s going to be early 2022 before we really see any major business [for Australia].”

She added that the sentiment is similar to what Australian meeting and incentive travel planners are saying.

“Our domestic research shows that a lot of business event activity relates to corporate confidence, and corporates are, understandably, being risk averse; they’re monitoring how the borders will operate [between Australia and New Zealand] and they’re so focused on ensuring that their people are safe; that they can get home easily and safely.”

She expects this to be the case should a travel bubble open between Australia and Singapore, and reiterated that consumer travel activity would help BEA formulate its strategy for business events in the future.

“[A travel bubble between Singapore and Australia would] definitely be good news,” said Lion, pointing out that customers' needs would lead the way in strategy formation.

“We would anticipate that the visiting friends and relative market would be the first cohort to travel followed by the leisure market. Once there's strong consumer confidence then we anticipate that business events would resume.”

In the interim, BEA and Australian convention bureaus are continuing to receive a high level of business events enquiries for 2022 and beyond, including incentive travel from Asia.

Strong support of a Southeast Asia showcase run by BEA and held virtually in February is indicative of the high level of enquiries being received locally, with 60 business event customers from India, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia participating.

Lion said the need of keeping Australia front of mind in all markets is imperative, particularly because she is of the opinion that Australia would not be reopening international borders as quickly as some other countries.

“We don’t believe Australia will be the first to open but we do want to keep Australia in mind [with buyers]."

Lion also believes the blanket approach to marketing and promotion will not be the way forward post-Covid or even sooner.

“Looking ahead we’ll be ascertaining what’s the right thing for each market. We will be more targeted with our approach in each market when the time is right to do so.”