Chairman's Message
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Providing quality visitor experiences is essential if Victoria is to maintain and grow its reputation as a desirable tourism destination.
The nature of Australia 's business and regulatory environment allows a relatively high degree of freedom when establishing and conducting business in the tourism and hospitality environment. Some perceive this as positive and others as negative, however without a regulatory framework tourism businesses have had to determine their own benchmarks for performance against which they believe market forces will respond. These key influences are generally driven by the desire to receive value for money, be safe and have memorable experiences.
To encourage sound business practices that assist with issues such as measuring performance and the challenge of consistent delivery, the tourism industry established its own voluntary accreditation program in the 1990s. It was realised quickly that accreditation could do much more. It had the capacity to improve levels of professionalism and ensure excellence outputs by individual businesses and across a range of businesses.
Tourism Excellence strives to go a step beyond tourism accreditation. It is a deliberate attempt to integrate professionalism and an expectation for excellence across all facets of the tourism experience, from the perspective of the individual, the business, the destination, and industry networks, as well as those suppliers and agencies that influence tourism business outputs. It seeks to build a competitive advantage based on exceptional visitor experiences delivered by Victoria 's exceptional tourism businesses that maintain standards of the highest quality.
The strategy focuses on the issue of quality, why it is important and how it can be improved. In recognition of the enormity of the scope of this project, its delivery has been grouped into seven key themes. Each theme will have goals, strategies, measures and links to a suite of tools.
Just as the scope of this strategy is enormous we believe the potential return to your business is enormous, and that there is greater risk to your business by not joining us as we travel a new pathway to profitability.
Jeremy Johnson
Chair, Tourism Excellence Steering Committee
CEO, Sovereign Hill