Tourism Futures, Australia’s pre-eminent tourism industry conference has launched a new online forum to discuss tourism related issues.

Since 2002, industry senior executives and government policy-makers have gathered annually at Tourism Futures to debate industry related issues – ranging from aviation policy to climate change and the skills shortage.

Tourism Futures Convenor, Tony Charters said that with the introduction of the online forum, debate and discussion can continue throughout the year with industry dialogue evolving within the global and national agendas.

“The online forum has the added bonus of being accessible to the whole industry.”
 
Mr Charters continued, “These are difficult times for the industry with both domestic and international visitor numbers down and it is important that governments and the private sector work closely together to tackle the many challenges we are facing.

“Historically the tourism industry has not been as unified as agriculture or mining, for example. The ability to connect online can only strengthen the industry by allowing many of the small to medium sized businesses which dominate the industry, to tap into the discussions.”

The first ‘conversation starter’ for the Tourism Futures online forum will be to attempt to understand the phenomena of online social networks and virtual worlds.

One of Australia’s Top 10 bloggers and social networking guru, Laurel Papworth presented a paper to the Tourism Futures conference in June this year, on marketing via social networks.

In this day and age where more people use the internet over watching television, the internet is a communication medium which will dominate marketing plans in the near future.

Yet social networking remains misunderstood and under-utilised, even by major corporations and senior executives.