Yorke Peninsula Tourism
Strategic Action Plan Towards 2030
Project Scope
The Yorke Peninsula is a coastal region in South Australia, renowned for its stunning coastline and beaches, its warm and welcoming communities and its rich and diverse history and culture.
Yorke Peninsula Tourism (YPT) are the peak body representing the visitor economy in the region. After much uncertainty and constant flux brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, YPT identified it was the ideal time to lift the gaze and imagine what could be possible for the region, and committed to the investment of a new Strategic Plan to guide the future direct of the region's Visitor Economy.
The Process
This project was divided into two distinct Stages:
- Destination Situation Analysis 2022 – which highlighted the state of play for tourism in the Yorke Peninsula, including deep listening from across the region of key challenges and opportunities. This document will remain an internal piece for key stakeholders reference when reading the Plan.
- Yorke Peninsula Strategic Action Plan - Towards 2030 – a co-created, agile, future-focused framework based on insights from the Situation Analysis, as well as a detailed Implementation Plan to enable sustainable growth for the Yorke Peninsula's visitor economy.
Destination Situation Analysis
In order to develop an agile and robust Plan for the region, it was essential to undertake a comprehensive review of the current state of the Visitor Economy.
A foundation of the review was wide and deep listening from across all visitor economy stakeholders, including local residents, tourism operators, local councils, first nations communities and state government departments.
This stakeholder engagement included 200+ hours of listening, with insights collected from over 220 residents, industry and government stakeholders through in-region workshops, online surveys and in-depth interviews.
This gave us a birds eye view of the state of play, the key challenges as identified by stakeholders, which which then helped identify the major opportunities for the Region.
^ Stakeholder Engagement Workshop at Wallaroo
The Plan
Drawing on this deep understanding of the current state of play, the Plan identified considered activities for YPT to activate and advocate for, to align priorities, efforts and investment in an agile and future focused blueprint.
Importantly, the vision and goals outlined in the Plan were co-created with community and industry to ensure they reflect what matters most when it comes to the community on the Yorke Peninsula.
Measuring Success
Given that the Yorke Peninsula's visitor economy trades on finite resources (people and environment) it was imperative the Plan have a sustainable approach to the development of the visitor economy.
In a first for South Australia's Destination Management Planning, the success of the Plan focuses on the measurement of the quadruple bottom line: Community, Environment, Visitor and Economy.
These measures seek to balance the needs of community and environment whilst also supporting the visitor in their travel pursuit, and growing the local economy (traditional measures of visitor economy success).
The Plan is currently being approved and endorsed by the YPT Board, and is available for viewing upon request.
It’s a rare and wonderful thing when the opportunity arises to work with a strategic partner who so emphatically embodies their stated values. Tourism eSchool’s approach to destination planning is premised on three pillars of Deep Listening, Evidence Based Planning and a Regenerative Mindset and the high quality of the work they produce is testament to the success of this approach.
Yorke Peninsula Tourism engaged Tourism eSchool to research and deliver a Strategic Tourism Action Plan in 2022 and a substantial aspect of this work was the research and development of a region-wide Situational Analysis. The thought, care and comprehensiveness of this analysis underpins the value of the whole Plan and sets our region up for long term success. By taking the time to genuinely listen and engage with a very broad range of stakeholders, Tourism eSchool were able to distil complex issues into clear, outcome-oriented action points. Further, their commitment to helping destinations evolve from a mindset of Destination Management to one of destination custodianship and stewardship is both strategically astute and environmentally and economically essential.