Compare. Two tourism ads using scenery, song and smiling, happy people.

The new Australian tourism ad :



The Iceland tourism ad :

Inspired by Iceland Video from Inspired By Iceland on Vimeo.

There's an energy to the Iceland ad that is sorely lacking in the Australian one.


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One of the latest contributions to the There's NothingLikeAustralia.net tourism website :




More Here

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The 'NothingLikeAustralia.net' tourism campaign keeps coming up with reader-submitted Gold :

More Here

There's Nothing Like...Fake Fakes?

By Darryl Mason

Within just two hours of Tourism Australia's new international "There's Nothing Like Australia" advertising campaign being launched, a parody site with an almost identical web address, was posting mock ads, and scoring the sort of widespread media attention that the original campaign launch sought, but did not get.

Some of the first images on the parody site.

The parody site is now taking suggestions for future slogan and image combinations.

As is the legitimate site.

The cynic in me wonders if, in fact, the real and parody sites are not more connected than it would appear.

After all, what's a major Australian tourism campaign without parodies and mockery? Why let someone else get in first and do something much worse with the slogan than any of the above?

Word got out that Tourism Australia was going to take legal action against the parody site, which bumped up the media coverage of the real and fake campaign sites, before Tourism Australia announced that no legal action was on the cards.

An example of a fake fake ad campaign?

Get Your Own Damn Pristine Beaches Of Paradise

Australia has plenty of the most beautiful beaches in the world. So many in fact, that other countries trying to lure holidaymakers to their comparably shabby shores think won't miss one or two of our lesser known beaches. Wrong.

Spanish officials have been caught passing off pictures from Australia and the Bahamas as their own in an effort to boost the country’s flagging tourism industry.

Officials from the Costa Brava Pyrenees Tourism authority have admitted using a photograph of a pristine beach and blue seas taken in Australia to illustrate a sun-baked strip of the northeastern Spanish coastline traditionally popular with British tourists.

They had to darken the colour of the sand to make it look more like a beach in Spain.

Points For Effort

Now this, this is amazing...


Snake Nearly Swallows Whole Kangaroo - Watch more free videos


Do snakes dare each other on to such remarkable feats of jaw stretching?

"Pffft. I once ate a whole koala, claws, everything."

"Oh yeah? Right. See that wallaby over there? Well, watch this!"

Another fantastic video to anti-promote Australia to tourists. 'It's not just dingos that can swallow your baby.'

Note to international readers : as the video shows, we Australians really do stand around in crowds on suburban street corners watching huge snakes trying to swallow wallabies and 'roos. Happens all the time.

If The Crocs Don't Eat You, The Locals Will

Considering the consistent popularity of gruesome horror movies amongst the world's youth, and the lack of tourism campaigns focusing on the more grislier attractions, perhaps the Daily Telegraph is onto something here :



Now there's an advertising campaign to draw in tourists, cannibalistic locals hiding in heritage listed forests and hungry crocs cruising for meaty thighs at resort beaches.

'Australia : Will You Make It Out Alive?'

Sure It Doesn't

I know these have been kicking around in e-mails for years, but I think they're excellent and I wish there was a whole collection, instead of just two :





Who made these originally? Anyone know? They deserve a credit. Why don't we have a real tourism campaign that takes these ideas and runs riot with them? That blows apart the tired old cliches, however true some may still be, about Australia?

The re-appearance of these images on Digg and other blogs have unleashed some vile, rabid anti-Orstrahyanism. Witness :

I’ve traveled all over the world, 5 different continents, and I can honestly say that Aussies are the only people that are dumber than Americans.

Now that hurts. A lot.

Australia Will Send Navy, Air Force After Japanese Whalers

Some forty years ago, tourists used to descend on Byron Bay to watch Australian whalers haul their massive catch onto the shore and then carve the mammals up.

Now tourists descend on Byron Bay to watch the whales swim serenely by, with more protection afforded to them than many Australian children.

The Rudd government is so serious about its promise to protect whales from Japanese harpoons while they're in Australian waters that they're now preparing to deploy the navy and air force :

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will announce details next week, but said the military could be used to gather damning evidence against Japanese harpooners.

He said his Government took seriously Australia's international obligations to protect whales from unauthorised killing and would look at measures to fortify any future case to be brought before international legal tribunals.

Japan does not recognise a huge whale sanctuary Australia has declared in the Southern Ocean.

This is not simply an issue of morality, or whale rights. Nor is it a cynical move by the Rudd government to keep happy the millions of Australians who are disgusted by the annual slaughter of whales by the Japanese.

Whale spotting, that is whale tourism, is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the Australian tourist economy. It is a boom industry, and the more whales Japanese harpooners kill, the less will will make their way along Australia's coastlines, delighting boatloads full of tourists.

$100 To Walk On Bondi Beach

In the early 1990s, I lived in Sydney's King Cross, where I'd regularly see tour buses come straight from the airport and deposit Japanese tourists at their hotels. From that moment on, they were not allowed to leave the eyesight of the tour operators. The tourists drank only at bars chosen by the tour company, the same went for restaurants, who kicked back money for all the international patronage shuttled their way, and the tourists were charged three or four times the standard admission price to get into places like Featherdale Wildlife Park so they could pat a koala bear. Of course, once they were inside the park, the Japanese tourists were often told there was an additional "patting fee".

None of them understood English, so how were they to know they were getting scammed?

I only know all this because I used to drink in a bar in the hotel where many of these well-scammed Japanese tourists used to stay, and I'd overhear tour operators laughing about how much they had fleeced from their patrons that day. Sometimes it was hundreds of dollars. Often it was more than $1000 from a tour group of 20 or 30 Japanese.

I lived in tourist-heavy Katoomba, in the Blue Mountains, in the late 1990s. At the beautiful lookout from where you could see an expanse of valleys and the rocky outcrop known as 'The Three Sisters' I once heard an English speaking bus driver tell his interpreter, to tell Japanese tourists, that there was an additional "viewing fee" of $20 each to just go and take a look at the scenic view from the free lookout.

It used to be the Japanese who got mugged like this. Now it's the Chinese tourists getting fleeced. The only thing that's changed is how much more brazen the tour operators have become.

Some Chinese tourists are being charged $100 just to talk a walk along the very-free Bondi Beach :

The situation is so bad that tourist industry officials fear Australia could be damaged as a brand and the massive economic benefits of the boom in travel from China could disappear.

Scams uncovered in Sydney include:

* Charging tourists $100 to walk on Bondi Beach or to have their photograph taken at the Opera House;

* Locking tourists in shops and confiscating passports until they spend big on overpriced goods;

* Unfulfilled promises of luxury central business district accommodation;

* Travellers crammed into minibuses and denied free time for their own shopping and sightseeing.

According to Choice consumer group spokeswoman Indira Nadoo, the Chinese are the perfect victims for such scams :

"...they are not used to international travel and can be quite naive, and many of them have little or no English, so if someone tells them that a sign on the beach says it costs $100 to walk on it, then they will believe them.

"Culturally, also, the Chinese are reluctant to create a fuss and complain so they will go along with what they are being told.

"We are already receiving thousands of complaints every year from Chinese tourists who are unhappy and we think that is the tip of the iceberg.

"We estimate that only about 10 per cent of those who are unhappy actually make a complaint, so in reality, tens of thousands of tourists are being ripped off."

China is Australia's fastest-growing inbound tourism market and annual numbers have soared by 280percent to more than 300,000 in the past seven years, making it the fifth biggest in terms of visitors and economic benefit. By 2015, almost 1million Chinese visitors are expected to visit Australia each year.

Charging vulnerable tourists to walk on a beach is sickening enough. But the following is downright disgusting :

Some are bussed directly from the airport to suburban warehouses which they are told are duty-free shops. "They are told they can't shop in normal shops in Sydney because Australians don't like the Chinese..." Ms Naidoo said.

If the Chinese tourist market is worth so many millions to Australia, and such scamming is likely to impact significantly on future tourism revenue from China, we clearly need to have people at the airports, or at least some Chinese-language signage, to warn them to be wary.

Or at least to tell them they don't have to pay $100 to take a walk along Bondi Beach.

Australia's Painted Desert

image from The Australian

Only a handful of people know the true location of one of Australia's most stunning natural treasures.

Australia's 'Painted Desert' is located in the South Australian outback and sits on land owned by a handful of farmers, and they don't want anyone to know that it's there.

Fear of 4WDs trashing the apparently fragile, extremely ancient landscape being Fear Number One.

South Australian Tourism Commission chief Bill Spurr - who flew hours through the outback to reach the location last week - told The Weekend Australian it offered a glimpse of some of the world's most stunning natural formations.

"Imagine a lunar landscape with conical shaped mountains stretching across the horizon," he said. "Now imagine the area covered in a patchwork of rich ochre, ranging from mustard to iron-ore red and whites. That's the beauty of the painted desert."

William Creek-based pilot Trevor Wright is one of the few people who have seen the clay and iron-oxide formations estimated to cover an expanse 20km wide and 10km long.

"The people who look after it guard it with their lives," Mr Wright said. "It was known about for years on the stations, but they wanted to keep it secret because of its fragility."

Paeleontologist Jim Gehling said the rocks were probably formed as a result of millions of years of climate change.

"The climate has gone from glacial to wet and semi-tropical over millions of years," Dr Gehling said. "Australia's landscape has only really dried up in the last three million years or so.

"What you're looking at is the leftover effects of about 50million years of climate change."

Adelaide University geologist John Foden said the rock formations were extraordinary.

The changing colours were the result of oxidation, he said. "The desert landscapes are red because of the oxidation of iron in the rocks. And you get leach zones where the iron has leached away and sections are white."