Tourism Australia giving away six “best jobs in the world”

What’s the only thing better than the best job in the world? Lots of best jobs in the world.

What’s the only thing better than the best job in the world? Lots of best jobs in the world.

Tourism Australia is reinventing Queensland’s acclaimed campaign, in which Englishman Ben Southall scored a high-paying job as a caretaker of a tropical island in The Whitsundays.

Tourism Australia will give away six “best jobs in the world” around the country as part of a $4 million youth tourism campaign to be launched in Cairns today.

Each of the jobs will showcase the best tourism attributes of each state and territory.

Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory’s tourism boards chose not to be part of the campaign.

Each of the jobs comes with a six month salary package worth $100,000, including living costs.

Southall has been recruited to star in a two-minute video to promote the campaign.

Around 35,000 applications were received for first The Best Job in the World campaign in 2009, which achieved worldwide publicity and was hailed as “the best idea since Willy Wonka decided to hide golden tickets in chocolate bars”.

Tourism Australia managing director Andrew McEvoy said he was prepared for criticism that the idea for the new campaign was not original.

“You don’t have to reinvent the wheel,” he said.

“The Best Job in the World was one of the great tourism marketing ideas of all time.

“We spoke to them about licensing that to us but expanding it and bringing in more commercial partners.

“If anything our industry walks away from great ideas too soon; I’m pleased and proud to say we have taken something developed in Queensland and made it national.”

The new campaign has been designed to target 18 to 30-year-old travellers and showcase the benefits of Australia’s Working Holiday Maker program, which allows young people from 29 countries to have an extended holiday in Australia and supplement their funds with short-term employment.

Tourism Australia will use the applications to create a data base of names of people interested in a working holiday.

Young tourists spend around $12 billion in Australia each year and make up a quarter of international visitors.

Mr McEvoy said working holiday makers tend to stay longer, disperse widely and often come back again, with their families, later in their lives.

Tourism Australia will work with state tourism bodies and organisations such as STA Travel and Virgin Australia, while jobs website Monster.com has created an online “jobs board” in advertising temporary jobs in Australia’s tourism industry.

AAT Kings chief executive Anthony Hayes, who was head of Tourism Queensland at the time of the Best Job in the World campaign, said he was approached by Mr McEvoy a few months ago about the idea.

“They sat down with Tourism Queensland and went through a lot of the detail to work out what worked and what didn’t work the first time around,” he said.

“A number of countries have done variations of it but they have just thrown lots of money at it and thought the real attraction was the million dollar salary.

“But Tourism Australia has made the campaign more about experiences.

“No-one in tourism is ever going to have the billion dollar budget of a McDonalds or Coca Cola so we have to be more creative about what we do and we have to work together.”

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Linda Hohnholz

Editor in chief for eTurboNews based in the eTN HQ.

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