Heading south for a weekend getaway has long been a tradition for many WA locals, and events are helping to build on the regions’ appeal. Emily Morgan reports.
THE south-west of Western Australia has always attracted visitors with its natural beauty, wine and waves, but events tourism has been an emerging pulling power for the area’s tourism industry.
For seven years Taste Great Southern has drawn travellers to Kojonup and Denmark, Busselton’s ironman competition is reaching iconic levels, and the Telstra Drug Aware Margaret River Pro surfing competition will host its 26th event in early April.
Surfing WA’s chief executive Mark Lane is the Telstra Drug Aware Pro event director, and says while the event is primarily there to promote the sport of surfing at a world-class surf break, the event aims to support local businesses through its operations.
“If you’re going to go in and use an area, you should ask how you can give the maximum back to that area,” Mr Lane says.
“We try to invest as much money back into the local community as possible.”
That’s a reference to the sponsorship dollars the event attracts, the bulk of which Mr Lane says is funnelled back into the local community and businesses in the form of service contracts at the event.
And it is big money; since 2009 the Margaret River Pro has increased its budget by upwards of $1 million, primarily through corporate and government sponsorship.
Having major blue-chip sponsors such as new naming rights sponsor Telstra on board has meant the event has been able to raise the prize pool, which has attracted 10-time world champion Kelly Slater and top five surfer and Yallingup local Taj Burrow to the competition.
And if Slater doesn’t increase a surfing competition’s credibility and spectator pulling power then nothing will.
Mr Lane says the local community is benefitting through the event’s commitment to offering local businesses service contracts.
The Margaret River Football Club is in charge of running the parking and roads system during the event – a clear fundraising opportunity – while Surfing WA directs its stakeholders and tourists to margaretriver.com as the preferred go-to accommodation site.
Locally owned wineries will host sponsor dinners while owner of local restaurant Gnarabar and WA Business News 40under40 winner Anthony Janssen has the contract for the event’s catering and corporate hospitality.
Since coming on board as the Surfing WA chief executive two years ago, Mr Lane has actively sought to improve the profile of the sport by attracting the world’s best surfers to the event, which he says is helped through the support of people in the area.
“Once you start to get support from the locals you really start to get things happening,” he says.
Government support integral
The Margaret River event also has TourismWA’s events tourism body Eventscorp as a sponsor, and is classified as one of Eventscorp’s major events alongside the Hopman Cup and The Art Gallery of WA’s Great Collections of the World exhibition series.
While the dollar value of the sponsorship deal is undisclosed, the value of Eventscorp is also visible through its ‘regional events scheme’, through which it sponsors regional events in order to develop tourism in an area.
And for smaller events like Taste Great Southern, which don’t have glossy sponsors such as Telstra and international sports stars on board, small grants can go a long way.
Taste Great Southern received $20,000 of the $300,000 provided through the regional events scheme across 2010-11 to events as diverse as the Ningaloo Whaleshark Festival and the Boyup Brook Country Music Festival.
Great Southern Tourism Events ran the March Taste Great Southern event for the first time this year; the organisation is the events arm of Denmark Tourism, whose chief executive Justine Nagorski says the RES grant was instrumental in expanding the event.
“We were able to extend our marketing push, more so than ever before, and that brings people into the region; they disperse throughout the region, they spend money and it also gives places like Broomehill, an old town that is a bit out of the way, an opportunity to revitalise,” she says.
Taste has been running for seven years and Ms Nagorski says the brand is strengthening year upon year, something local businesses can take advantage of.
“It’s about educating business on how they can capitalise on the opportunity,” she says.
Ms Nagorski aims to use events tourism as a way of pushing the boundaries of what is historically a peak period for visitors, an aim shared by Eventscorp.
“Using events to attract the Perth market during the off-peak period is the only way we can boost visitation over what is known as the dead month of August,” Ms Nagorski says. “We have the human resources to do that and we also have the financial support from government and external agencies to pull that together.”
Presently, the most popular of Taste’s events falls on the March Labour Day long weekend, a time when Ms Nagorski says tourism is already at its peak.
She hopes to either create spin-off events or push the main event itself to the winter months, thereby creating more fluidity in the region’s tourism, which is its main economic driver.
“It’s about stabilising visitation throughout the year,” Ms Nagorski told Business Class.
Tourism Minister Kim Hames is in favour of broadening the scheme and noted how successful some of the events already supported by regional events scheme have become.
“All of those events are becoming a lot more popular, you look at the ironman event, it is almost becoming iconic. It’s the same with the Busselton sailing, Geographe Bay race week, that has gone from 30 or 40 yachts to around 100 yachts now,” Mr Hames says. “We are trying to encourage events like that, that will get people out and see it, either from Perth or other states or even internationally.”
He says the scheme will definitely be extended, with the only question being whether the level of support will be increased.
“We are going to be looking over the next year to do more of that. Particularly we are looking for increased funding to look at regional events throughout the length and breadth of WA and how we can better promote tourist opportunities and get people going and visiting those other parts of the state,” Mr Hames says.
“We have to go through our budget process and if we get what I am seeking, then we will have some really good plans coming out of that.”
The Telstra Drug Aware Pro is another example of an event organised outside of peak tourism periods, and while it could be easily mistaken as a decision based on the best swell, Mr Lane says it is for more strategic reasons.
The event is in April, a far cry from the manic Margaret River months of January and February.
“We’re trying to mix the event in so that for another two weeks the tourism trading period is extended,” Mr Lane says of the surfing contest, visitors to which had an economic impact of $884,517 on the state last year.
Results are in
According to Eventscorp, tourists’ feet, and wallets, are ‘doing the talking’ when it come to showing the success of the government’s support of regional events.
The Telstra Drug Aware Pro, Manjimup’s Great WA Bike Ride, the Cape-to-Cape mountain biking event in Margaret River, Busselton’s ironman Triathalon and the Anaconda Adventure race are under Eventscorp’s major funding pool.
Eventscorp executive director David Van Ooran reports that last year those events injected more than $8.6 million into the South West and Great Southern regions and attracted close to 5,000 visitors from outside WA.
Mr Van Ooran points to the marketing efforts of TourismWA as another example of how the state government is aiming to boost tourism to the South West, through which it promotes events under Eventscorp’s sponsorship programs and those that are not, but still important to the state’s tourism.
The Quit Forrest Rally, the Margaret River Wine Region Festival and the Manjimup Cherry Harmony Festival are all being promoted with the aim of increasing attendance at events and thereby increasing visitation to the state and regional areas.