3.0 Themes

3.6. Awareness and marketing

Consistent and clear marketing is vital in raising awareness of accessible and inclusive offerings by tourism businesses. Quite simply, if a business is accessible and inclusive but yet fails to talk about it clearly and consistently through its marketing channels, it's impossible for a visitor with a disability to easily find out, share and most importantly book. By showcasing inclusive features and accessibility initiatives, tourism businesses can reach a broader audience, including individuals with disability, their families, friends and carers, fostering greater engagement and loyalty. Highlighting accessible and inclusive attractions, providing dedicated accessibility guides, equipment galleries or inclusive certifications assures potential visitors that their needs will be accommodated. This builds trust making it easier to plan and book. 

As a sign of great progress, in 2021, Tourism Australia announced a $12 million content creation initiative aimed at supporting tourism businesses across Australia to drive increased visitation by helping them to better market their experiences and attractions. The National Experience Content Initiative (NECI) provided a suite of new imagery and footage for up to 1,500 tourism experiences from across Australia. A key component of NECI was ensuring that accessibility and inclusivity initiatives were identified and showcased. This meant that across the Tourism Australia and state and territory tourism content libraries, there is now a huge supply of accessible and inclusive content available for industry. This has filled a major gap which was identified in our earlier editions and a major barrier raised by people with disability in having and seeing themselves in content.