Months of Unprecedented Fires Ravage Australia’s Tourism Industry – Skift

It’s becoming a familiar story: Extreme weather events and natural disasters — be it flooding, fires, or snowstorms — reaching unprecedented and record-breaking levels, upending local communities, cities, and ecosystems and, of course, battering tourism industries as a result.

The fires in Australia have been raging since the autumn and affecting tourism-heavy regions in the states of Victoria and New South Wales. There have also been fires in Western Australia, South Australia, and Tasmania. Residents and tourists have been evacuated from the New South Wales’ 155 mile coastline in what the Transport minister called the “largest mass relocation of people out of the region that we’ve ever seen.” Conditions could worsen over the weekend, with temperatures on the southern coast climbing.

As it is summer in the southern hemisphere, the Christmas and school holiday period are a high time for tourism. The Australian Tourism Industry Council told the Guardian Australia yesterday that while it’s still too early to assess the full impact, the loss would figure in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The council’s director added that the heavy media coverage of the fires oversees — underscored by the Australian prime minister’s unpopular response to the crisis — was having “an unquestionable mounting impact on tourism from these fires.”

The Guardian further reported that more than 4,000 insurance claims at a cost of $297 have been made since the fires started. Furthermore, Reuters reported that during December, Sydney hotels saw at 10 percent decline in guests.

Though it may be undoubtedly horrendous for tourism operators, tourism is certainly not the most tragic casualty of the wildfires. Tragically, it’s been reported that half a billion animals and plants have died as a result of the fires, many homes lost, at least 19 deaths, and more people are missing.

That’s perhaps why Australian Tourism Minister Simon Birmingham had to defend a decision earlier this week to roll-out a sunny campaign targeted at Brits, inviting them to escape the Brexit blues and come for a trip down under. Criticism of the campaign centered around the unsophisticated way it portrayed Australians, but also the fact it was rolled out in the UK over Christmas, as the British and global media was saturated with apocalyptic-looking coverage of the fires. Birmingham defended the campaign to the Sydney Morning Herald on Wednesday.

Prime Minster Scott Morrison said the fires were likely to last until there is significant rainfall. As is often the case with tourism, it’s not conditions on the ground that determine whether tourists will book, but their perception of it. Currently, down under, it seems that both are bad. The challenges for Australia’s tourism industry will be similar to California, where Governor Jerry Brown described wildfire seasons that last nearly all year as “the new abnormal.”

Skift reached out to the Australian Tourism Industry Council and will update this post with further comment if they respond.

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