Somewhere in the Tourism 2035 plan, under the photography of reefs and the language of aspiration, sits a number that should keep a delivery lead awake. Four and a half million. That’s the extra international airline seats Australia needs over the decade to make the strategy work, and not one of them is in Tourism Australia’s gift to provide.
For anyone delivering a tourism project, this is the most important sentence in the document, because it names the dependency the whole thing hangs on. And it’s a dependency owned by someone else entirely.
This is the oldest problem in delivery wearing a holiday brochure. You can build the resort, run the campaign, train the staff and open the doors, and if the flights don’t land at the volume the plan assumed, none of it matters. The destination is not the risk. The route is. A regional tourism project in particular lives or dies on aviation capacity it has no authority over: the airline decides the schedule, the seat count, whether the route survives the next reshuffle of the network.
I’ve run projects whose critical path ran straight through a third party who hadn’t committed to anything. It’s a specific kind of exposure. Your Gantt chart looks complete, every task neatly owned, and then there’s one box that says “airline confirms seasonal capacity” and you don’t own the pen. Pretend that box is like the others and you’re planning on a fiction.
The instinct of a weak plan is to bury that dependency in an assumptions log and move on. The instinct of a good one is to treat it as the single most important thing to manage, because it is. Here’s what that looks like in practice for a tourism or hospitality project.
You surface the dependency early and loudly, at the business case, not in a risk review eighteen months later. If the whole thing rests on route X carrying Y passengers, that belongs on the front page, not buried on slide forty.
You build the relationship with the party you depend on before you need them. Airlines, airports, the aviation planners inside the tourism body — these are stakeholders, and a stakeholder you first contact when you’re already in trouble is a stakeholder who can’t help you. The time to understand the airline’s route economics is while you’re scoping, not while you’re opening.
You plan for the dependency to fail. What does the project look like if the route doesn’t come, or comes late, or comes at half the seats? If the honest answer is “it doesn’t work,” you’ve found a risk that should reshape the plan now, while reshaping is cheap. Maybe the phasing changes. Maybe the catchment strategy widens to reduce single-route reliance. Maybe the project is simply the wrong size for the aviation reality.
And you monitor the dependency as a live thing, not a settled one. Route decisions shift. A seasonal service becomes year-round, or quietly disappears. The seat capacity your business case assumed in year one is not guaranteed in year three. If your project’s viability rests on it, someone needs to be watching it the way they’d watch the budget.
The 4.4 million figure is Tourism Australia being unusually honest about its own critical path. Most strategies hide their central dependency behind confident language. This one put it in the headline. The operators who read it as a warning rather than a boast are the ones who’ll build around it before it builds around them.
So, for anyone with a tourism project on the drawing board: what’s your version of the 4.4 million? The input your whole plan depends on and your organisation doesn’t control? Name it now. The alternative is finding it the hard way, on opening week, when the fix is no longer available.
Related: The one deadline that doesn’t negotiate and Overtourism is a stakeholder you forgot to count.
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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