Twenty-nine point seven billion dollars came from Australians travelling inside their own country in a single quarter, and almost none of it made the front page. The headlines went, as they always do, to the international arrivals: the markets reopening, the long-haul confidence, the planes from somewhere distant. The quiet, dependable domestic traveller who actually underwrites the visitor economy got the usual silence.
This is not just a marketing oversight. It’s a project scoping problem, and it shows up in what gets built.
When international arrivals dominate the conversation, they dominate the brief. The hotel gets designed for the overseas guest. The campaign chases the long-haul market. The experience is scoped for the visitor who flew eighteen hours, not the family who drove three. And then the project opens into a market where domestic travel is, and remains, the largest single contributor to the whole economy, and the product is subtly aimed at the wrong person.
I’ve seen the equivalent in plenty of sectors: the business case built around the exciting customer while the reliable one, the one who actually turns up quarter after quarter, is treated as too obvious to design for. It’s a failure of attention, and it’s expensive, because the reliable customer is the one who determines whether the numbers hold in a normal year rather than a record one.
For a delivery lead, the domestic figure carries a few concrete instructions.
Scope for the base, not the spike. International demand is the volatile line: sensitive to exchange rates, geopolitics, aviation, a bad news cycle in a source market. Domestic is the base load. A tourism project sized primarily on international upside is riskier than one whose viability holds on domestic demand alone, with international as the margin. Ask which one your business case actually depends on to break even.
Design for the traveller who’s genuinely coming. The domestic guest has different needs, different booking behaviour, different length of stay, different price sensitivity, different reasons for choosing you. A product designed for an overseas fantasy and sold to a domestic reality disappoints both. The design brief should reflect who fills the rooms on an ordinary Tuesday in a shoulder month.
Weight the risk register accordingly. If international arrivals are the headline but domestic is the backbone, the single biggest risk to the project isn’t a drop in overseas visitors. It’s anything that dents domestic demand: cost-of-living pressure, fuel prices, a soft consumer. Those belong at the top of the register, not as a footnote to the glamorous international line.
And resist the pull of the exciting number in governance. Boards love the international story. It photographs well. The job of the delivery lead is to keep the steady, unglamorous, load-bearing customer in the room when the decisions get made, because that’s the customer whose behaviour the project actually rests on.
The domestic backbone gets neglected precisely because it’s dependable. Nobody worries about the thing that keeps showing up, until it wobbles, and then everyone in the building suddenly has an opinion. A tourism project built with the reliable traveller at its centre and the exciting one at its margin is a more robust project. The reverse is a nicer pitch and a weaker asset.
So when you’re scoping the next hotel, attraction or campaign, the question is worth asking plainly: who is this actually for? The visitor who makes the brochure, or the one who fills the rooms? Because the answer decides how well the thing holds up once the record year is over and an ordinary one arrives.
Related: The recovery isn’t finished, and the projects betting on it should know that and Eighty-five per cent of the decisions, seventeen per cent of the room.
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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