Twenty per cent up. Nine million visitors. Ninety-nine per cent of the way back to pre-pandemic. And the export council’s response was to tell the room to keep its coats on.
They’re right, and for anyone with a tourism or hospitality project in flight, they’re right in a way that costs money. A lot of delivery decisions get made on the strength of a headline like that. The developer greenlights the fourth tower on a demand curve. The hotel group signs off a refurbishment budget assuming next summer looks like this one. The destination campaign gets scoped for volume that the forecast, read carefully, doesn’t quite promise.
Here’s the trap the number sets. Converting an international inquiry into a confirmed booking is getting harder, and inflation is quietly padding that twenty per cent. So the demand a project is being sized against is softer than the top line suggests. Build to the headline and you’ve over-scoped: too many rooms, too much fit-out, a launch calibrated for a market that turns up at eighty per cent of the promise.
I’ve watched capital projects commit to a peak and then spend two years delivering into a trough, because the business case was signed at the top of a cycle and nobody built a downside into the scope. In tourism that mistake has a long tail. A hotel is a ten-year bet made on an eighteen-month forecast. An event venue is sized for the crowd you hope for, not the one that shows. The lead time between deciding and delivering is exactly where a demand assumption goes stale.
So what does a delivery lead actually do with the council’s warning? Three things, and none of them are exotic.
You stage the commitment. If demand is uncertain, you phase the build so the later stages depend on the earlier ones proving out. You don’t pour the whole footprint on a forecast; you pour what the confirmed pipeline supports and keep the option to expand. Optionality costs a little upfront and saves you from being the resort with two empty wings.
You watch the leading indicator, not the lagging one. Arrivals and spend are last year’s news by the time they’re published. The signal that matters to a project timeline is forward booking pace, search data, aviation seat commitments on the routes that feed your catchment. Those tell you whether the market you’re building for is still coming.
And you write the downside into the plan while it’s cheap to do so. Before the contractor’s mobilised. Before the marketing spend is committed. The moment to plan for eighty per cent of forecast is the moment everyone’s celebrating a hundred and ten.
The council isn’t being gloomy. It’s handing every operator with something under construction a piece of usable intelligence: the recovery is real but not finished, and a project sized for finished is a project carrying risk nobody priced. The discipline isn’t refusing the good news. It’s refusing to let the good news do your scoping for you.
So the question, if you’ve got a build, a campaign or an event depending on next year’s numbers: is your scope sized for the forecast, or for the headline? Because they are not the same figure, and the gap between them is where the money leaks.
Related: The backbone everyone forgets to design for and The dangerous comfort of the middle.
Ben Webb is an award-winning project leader and delivery strategist. He was named Australian Institute of Project Management Project Manager of the Year in 2022 and nominated for the IPMA World Project Manager of the Year in 2023.
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