What makes a place a destination for an international visitor? Last week I was introduced to the acronym WWOOFer. And learnt we have WWOOFers who come from overseas to spend time at an organic farm on the outskirts of Yeppoon. World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) is, as the name indicates, an international call out for volunteers to live, work, and learn on an organic farm. Then on Monday I was told of regular visitors from China who come to Yeppoon to fish. Catching metre-long barramundi is their objective, but just getting any fish at the end of the line is enough to keep them coming back. Simple things attracting international visitors to our region for a reasonable period of time. Admittedly, the numbers of these type of visitors (and their spending) may not be large and thus not have a noticeable impact on our economy, but I suspect even without much marketing both of these markets will continue to grow and become more noticeable.
At the recent Future CQ forums, taking pride in and selling our region was the call out to locals to help give our economies a boost. How can this be stimulated? Just finding out that international WWOOFers and fishing enthusiasts are coming here is one way. But, hearing their stories could be even more powerful. You hear it all the time, ‘you don’t appreciate how good it is here until you leave’. To combat the neighbour’s grass is always greener syndrome and help stimulate more pride and salesmanship of our region can we (locals) hear the visitor’s stories, especially from the less typical tourist. What brings a girl from Uruguay to Yeppoon and feel the need to build a pizza oven out of clay while there working on an organic farm? Why does a group of fishing enthusiasts from China take connecting flights to get to Yeppoon rather than flying direct to Darwin to catch barramundi? Maybe these stories are in the glossy tourist brochures, but as web sites like Trip Advisor indicate people value simple ‘real’ unpaid reviews. What is the power of reviews done by locals? Volunteers at information centres can only do so much, and with the technology and information readily available to visitors is the stop at the information centre that necessary these days? If we can better inform locals of the different people and reasons why they are coming to our region then isn’t there than more people and reasons to help sell our region? And the more positive stories we hear about our region the more pride we take in it! Should, therefore, a bigger percentage of the marketing efforts (resources) of our tourist and development bodies be directed at locals, rather than potential visitors, enabling more ‘real’ content about our region to be easily created and shared by real locals, like what recently happened with CapriCon?