A report from the Lord Howe Island Tourism Association following attendance at the Destination Australia national industry forum.

Chelsea Holden, Secretary and Stephen Sia, President, Lord Howe Island Tourism Association, Lord Howe Island Signal

Last month the Lord Howe Island Tourism Association attended Destination Australia, a national conference examining the state and direction of Australian tourism. The conversations covered consumer behaviour, content strategy, international markets, and the long-term future of aviation. This is a brief account of what stayed with us.

The resilience of travel demand was a prominent theme. Despite real cost-of-living pressure, people are continuing to prioritise travel over many other forms of spending. The definition of luxury is shifting alongside this: less about status and more about quality of time, slowness, and natural authenticity. That is a direction that plays to what Lord Howe Island already is, though the reality is that reaching the Island remains expensive, and that our aviation access and fuel supply constraints are ongoing challenges without easy solutions.

Visitors, particularly younger ones, are moving away from structured itineraries toward self-directed, emotionally connected experiences. They want to move at their own pace and engage with a place on their own terms. The experience should feel open rather than programmed, which is something Lord Howe Island offers without having to manufacture it. This does not mean the guided tour or the group booking is disappearing. Older travellers, who remain a vital part of who visits this Island, often plan through travel agents and value a degree of structure and familiarity. Lord Howe Island has always served both kinds of visitor. The task ahead is making sure we continue to do that well, rather than chasing one audience at the expense of the other.

The conference introduced a campaign theme ‘Green is Our Gold’, and it reflected: sustainability is no longer a point of difference. It is an expectation. Most destinations are now working out how to retrofit environmental responsibility onto places that were built without it. Lord Howe Island does not have that problem. The Island’s isolation, and the limits on how many people can visit at any one time, have done something that conservation programmes elsewhere spend decades trying to achieve. The natural environment here is recovering. Species are returning. These things exist not because of a marketing strategy, but because of decades of decisions made by this community. The work now is making sure the world knows what is already here, and telling that story in a way that does justice to it.

That connects to something else the conference made clear: the tourism industry is working hard to become what Lord Howe Island already is. Regenerative tourism, slower travel, experiences rooted in place and nature. These are the directions the broader market is chasing. For this Island, the priority is not reinvention. It is articulation.

The way people find a destination has changed, and this matters more than it might seem. Travellers now research and experience a place online long before they book. They watch short-form video on TikTok, read recent visitor accounts, and form a strong impression of what a destination feels like before they have ever set foot there. The content that works is not polished promotional imagery. It is real and unfiltered, and it answers the question people are actually asking: what is it like to be there? A woodhen crossing the road. Star gazing. A family cooking the fish they caught that morning. These are the moments that stay with people, and they are the moments that travel.

For Lord Howe Island, this means the visitor experience now begins well before the plane lands on the Island. It begins with what someone finds when they search for us online, what they watch, what they read, and how that shapes what they expect.

On the international front, the returning Chinese visitor market was discussed in some depth. Behaviour has shifted toward more independent travel with strong digital influence, and one practical point stayed with us: many destinations, including ours, are still not adequately accessible to Chinese-speaking visitors online. The conference also included a forward-looking discussion on aviation technology, including hypersonic travel and cleaner long-haul experiences.

This article appeared in Lord Howe Island Signal, 31 March 2026.