Tourism Matters

Professor Anne Hardy: Why Tourism Research Matters - Behaviour, Data and Antarctica

• Carmen Bold • Episode 13

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In this episode of Tourism Matters, Carmen Bold speaks with Professor Anne Hardy — tourism researcher, consultant, academic, and Chair of Destination Southern Tasmania — about how research can shape tourism decisions.

Anne shares the story of her career in tourism academia, from studying tourism’s impacts on communities to leading innovative projects like Tourism Tracer, which used smartphone technology to track how visitors move through destinations. She also discusses her research in Antarctica exploring whether travel experiences can influence environmental behaviour.

The conversation explores why tourism operators rarely access academic research, how behaviour change theories can improve visitor experiences, and why the industry needs stronger connections with universities.

Anne also reflects on redundancy after a 20-year academic career and her mission to help researchers communicate their work more effectively with industry.

What You'll Take Away From This Episode

 • How tourism researchers study visitor behaviour and decision-making
 • The Tourism Tracer project and how technology tracked visitor movement
 • What Antarctica tourism reveals about behaviour change and sustainability
 • Why tourism businesses should engage more with academic research
 • How behaviour change theory can improve visitor experiences and operations

About Anne

Professor Anne Hardy is a tourism researcher whose work focuses on tourism behaviour, mobility, sustainability, and research communication.

Across a 20-year academic career she has published more than 80 journal articles and four books, with her research cited over 3,000 times. Her work has been presented at international forums including the United Nations World Tourism Organization and the United Nations Environment Program.

Anne is particularly known for pioneering projects such as Tourism Tracer, which tracked visitor movement across destinations using mobile technology, and for her research exploring how travel experiences — particularly in Antarctica — can influence environmental behaviour.

She is currently Chair of Destination Southern Tasmania and now works to bridge the gap between tourism research and industry practice.

Connect with Anne on LinkedIn

Connect with Carmen on LinkedIn

Organisations Referenced

Destination Southern Tasmania: https://southerntasmania.com.au/

Omineca Consulting: https://www.ominecaconsulting.com/

Antarctic Treaty System: https://www.ats.aq/

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/

University of Tasmania: https://www.utas.edu.au/

Episode Chapters

 02:58 Travel Preferences and Experiences
 05:58 Early Life and Education in Tasmania
 08:55 Career Path: From Law to Tourism
 11:58 Academic Journey and Research Focus
 14:58 Impact of Family on Career Choices
 17:59 Understanding Academia and the PhD Process
 21:00 Communicating Research and Industry Engagement
 23:42 The Evolution of Academic Communication
 26:46 Anne’s Career Journey and Experiences
 31:44 Innovative Research and Technology in Tourism
 38:04 Transformative Travel Experiences
 49:31 Navigating Career Changes and Future Aspirations
 53:39 Embracing the Radical Sabbatical
 56:38 Navigating Academic Careers
 01:00:07 Understanding Human Behaviour in Tourism
 01:04:50 The Importance of Communication in Research

SPEAKER_01

Welcome friends to the Tourism Matters Podcast, where I, Carmen Bold, explore the people, careers, and ideas shaping the tourism industry today. In episode number 13, I have the great pleasure of sitting down to chat with Professor Anne Hardy. Now, if you're a regular listener of the show, you know that I don't normally read a bio, but this week, I'm doing it. Anne is a researcher with an interest in tourist behaviour, tourism mobilities, and sustainable tourism. Her research has been cited over 3,000 times, and she's the author of over 80 journal articles and four books. Anne has spoken at events organized by the United Nations World Tourism Organization, One Planet Sustainability Initiative, which is a mouthful, might I add, World Expo Dubai, and the United Nations Environment Program. Anne is extremely passionate about the transfer of academic knowledge from academia to industry. And she's currently the chair of regional tourism organization Destination Southern Tasmania, which is, of course, how I know Anne. So, folks, listening for a masterclass into the world of academia and Anne's mission to close the gap between academia and industry. Hear about her fascinating research in Antarctica and her view on tourism in that region, as well as navigating redundancy and following your passion. Please enjoy the episode, and I'll see you at the end to give my two Bobs and my key takeaways. Professor Anne Hardy, welcome to the Tourism Matters Podcast. Thank you for being here with me today. Thanks, Carmen. So you're in Hobart. I'm in Perth. I know Anne through her illustrious position as the chair of Destination Southern Tasmania. So we've known each other for a few years now. So I've been eagerly awaiting this conversation. Anne, I'm very stoked to be sitting here with you today. Thank you. I'm excited as well. Good. It's going to be fun. Right. So before I get started, a couple of get to know you questions. I know you, but my listeners may not know you. So Anne, when you're traveling, flying on the aircraft, selecting your seats, are you aisle seat, middle seat, or window seat?

SPEAKER_00

I am like I've actually just changed. So for the whole for the last 20 or 30 years, I've been aisle because I'm quite tall and just like all the other listeners that I've heard, I like to be able to get up and move around. And also I despite traveling, I had a mortal, I'm really scared of heights and I had a mortal fear of flying. So for some reason, the aisle street seat like really helps me with my flying. But I've got over that flair through um a combination of many, many things. And the last just the last two months, I'm like, I'm gonna book the window. So I'm going window. I'm changing.

SPEAKER_01

All right.

SPEAKER_00

How's the window working out for you? Well, pretty good. I haven't done a long haul. I'll do that in April. So I don't know how I'm gonna go with the kind of, you know, I need to go to the loose situation, stretch my legs. But I just realized you get more room when you're crammed up in cattle class. And I'm always traveling cattle class because that's what happens when you're an academic. Um, so I've decided that um I'm gonna try it. I'm gonna change. It's a changing time of life.

SPEAKER_01

Wow, this is bucking the trend though, because I think everyone I've had so far has gone the other way. Used to be window, now I'm aisle.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I know. It's weird, but yeah, I've just decided to change because I just love it. You know, when you're flying, say you're going to Europe and you go over India and you can just look and you can see, or you know, the Middle East, you can see all the lights. And I've decided that I want to get into that. And now I'm no longer scared of flying. So yeah, I'm changing.

SPEAKER_01

All right. So how long's the upcoming long haul flight?

SPEAKER_00

Uh, that's gonna be a long many, many hours of mistake. So it'll be like it'll be over to Italy. So it's gonna be, you know, 12 and then eight. So if I regret it, I'll I'll let you know. Yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_01

All right. This question isn't really coming as a surprise to anyone anymore because I keep asking the same question, but I'm going to keep asking it until somebody tells me that they choose the middle seat. I can't wait for that. Yeah. Nobody that then when somebody tells me they choose the middle seat, then I'll stop asking and I'll move on to a new question. But until then I'm collecting data. That's great. That's great. Now, the next question is the same as I always ask my guests, but I just feel it's very revealing. And at the hotel buffet breakfast, Ann, what's going on your plate?

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Or your bowl.

SPEAKER_00

I know. Look, um, yeah, I'm a savory girl, so I tend to go uh savory and um normally like quite healthy. I try to kind of go savory healthy, but then if there's anything from the country that I'm in, I'll go for that. So I love trying news like the best buffet I think I ever had was down in South Korea, and it was so good, it was delicious. So yeah, savory and mix it up. So I'll just kind of look and what's on there, and if it's local, I'll go for it.

SPEAKER_01

Wow. Yeah, I love it when the hotel has the local, some local fare to dabble in.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I do as well. Yeah, but I can't go the I can't go the full Hong Pen English breakfast anymore or the you know, the four croissants. It just doesn't work, it doesn't work. I've got too old.

SPEAKER_01

All right, well, thank you for that insight, Anne. I uh yeah, I definitely feel like I've just peeled back a layer. Um so I'd like to go back to young Anne. Now you are born and bred in Tasmania, yes?

SPEAKER_00

Yes, I am. Yeah, embarrassingly in Tasmanian, yes.

SPEAKER_01

That's not embarrassing.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, no. Well, my husband or we always have a joke because um I married an Englishman, my sister married an American, and my my m father and mother's family have been in Tassie for a couple of hundred years. So we always have a bit of an inbreeding joke going on that that's why we had to marry out. Um so that's why I say embarrassing anyway. Yes, grew up in Tassie. Grew up in Tassie.

SPEAKER_01

Um so tell me what you did when you finished high school. Did you go on to study? Obviously, you went on to study.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I did. I um well immediately after I finished high school, I actually went over and did an exchange scholarship in Finland, and I went to a little town called Yaravenpa, which was uh north of Helsinki, in uh early 1990s, just as the Berlin Wall was going down and um the the the states were, you know, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia were becoming independent away from um the USSR, what it was then. So it was a really changing time. And Finland back then was very, you know, people didn't really know about it. I I knew someone who was living there and she was in Australia for an exchange scholarship and said, You want to do an exchange, why don't you come to Finland? So um about a day after I finished school, I think I packed up um with my friend, and we went and had a few days in Amsterdam, then we split up and she went on to Germany and I went and did an exchange in Finland for for 12 weeks.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, so that was a that was when you say exchange, what were you what were you doing?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, studying? Well, basically, yeah, I went to school. Um, and I went to a Finnish high school. Um, she had, I guess it was sort of a and then later on, years later, um my host sister, the youngest one, the eldest had already been to Australia, and years later the youngest one came to Australia and went to school. So we we literally exchanged. Um and yeah, I went to school in Finland for 12 weeks. I uh understood very little, but I tried really hard to learn Finnish, which is an exceptionally difficult language.

SPEAKER_01

Oh my goodness. Wow.

SPEAKER_00

Uh and um it that kind of really fueled my fire and my love of travel, I guess. I realized I could be independent and travel on my own, and that really gave me that love of love of travel. And then I came back, went to university, started doing arts and law, and wanted to be an environmental law lawyer, um, protecting the Antarctic. Um, that was my original goal. And then after a couple of years, I just decided that the nuts and bolts of law were actually not for me. They were a bit too boring. So I had a year off and I went traveling again. Oh, wow, okay. Um yeah, went to Europe, did the backpacker thing, and then I came back to um I went over there and worked worked in Butlands, which was a big holiday camp in the UK. Right. Um, and that is that's considered to be really where that model of holidaying is where they kind of say modern travel began. So, you know, when they bought in trains in the 1800s or early 1900s, these holiday camps along the coast of the UK formed. Um, one of them was Butlands, and there were several Butlands around the UK, and people go there and stay there in a kind of closed-in camp, and there's about 3,000 guests and about 1,500 staff, and you live on campus or camp. And um, I worked there, and ironically, that was really the start of modern travel where I was working. That's that model was what how travel began. Oh, what did you do there? What was your job? So, for the people from the UK, they all understand. I worked on the fairground and I also and I wore a red coat, so I was a red uh like a working. So red coats and the um buttons are quite well known. Um and I also worked in a shop that sold trolls. Trolls sold little trolls with the hair. Yes. So I was a troll retail assistant, um, and that was just fabulous. It was so boring. We used to comb the trolls' hair. Yeah, I spent a lot of time combing my trolls' hair when I was trolls. Well, that's right. I spent an awful lot of time trolling for a putting trolls hair. Um yeah, for a job. And um, then I worked on the fairground, and um then we just travelled through Europe for six months and then I came back to uni, decided okay, I need to change, did some different subjects, ended up with a Bachelor of Science, and that's when I started going into further study and getting into tourism.

SPEAKER_01

Oh it's gonna take me a second just to move past the combing trolls here. I've just got the tagline. I'm not sure if I'll be able to make you seriously for the rest of that.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Trome, co troll, coma.

SPEAKER_01

Would you have um described yourself uh in your teen years or you know, uh during this time of your life as an extroverted personality?

SPEAKER_00

Uh, do you think I'm extroverted? No, I'm asking you, do you? Yes, no, totally. Like I went to a school, a really small girl's school, until I was 16. And I always remember, and I often re-write to her now, um, I had a drama teacher who was amazing called Mrs. Herman, and um she used to put on these plays, and when it was one play was Henry VIII, and I was Henry VIII, um, another play was um about Egypt, and I was like King Nebuchadnezzar. I I was always very extroverted, um, sometimes a bit too much so at school, and I I've always loved being around people, and um and she taught us a lot about public speaking as well. And as time has gone has gone on, and I've done more and more public speaking, the things that Mrs. Herman taught me have have really helped all through my life. So it's amazing. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Oh, that's so interesting. On on a little side note there, my 10-year-old son has just decided he's doing drama as his elective, and he loves his drama teacher. So maybe his drama teacher has the same lifelong effect on him.

SPEAKER_00

Yes, I think those skills are under undervalued, you know, public speaking, confidence, um, all that type of stuff.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah, especially in our um lovely little industry. Um, right, so you graduate with a Bachelor of Science and then you carry on to further study straight away.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, straight away. I yeah, so I kind of came back from that overseas travel really having been inspired by going around Europe and seeing different countries. And around that time my parents had um had a big life change, and they had bought this farm out of Sorel and built up a pick your own fruit farm. So the idea was that people could go out and pick like strawberries, cherries, a few raspberries, apricots. Um, and and during that time when my father, who originally was an ag scientist, and my mother was a school teacher, so they had this big career shift, bought this property, planted everything from scratch, the whole 12 acres they planted out, went to what was then Tourism Tasmania back in the day and said, we want to start up a tourism business where an agritourism. And back in the day, in the late 80s, they said tourism Tas said, there is no such thing as agritourism. Can you believe it?

SPEAKER_01

Wow, yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Um and my dad, who was a bit of a scientist, began to collect data on how many people were coming through the farm and where they were from to prove to the agency, the government agency, that he was attracting tourists. And that really fascinated me that he was a had a bit of a scientific brain and he was in tourism and he was trying to combine the two, but um the the old traditional people were like, Oh, you're not tourism. And so that really um combined with my travel, I just thought, oh, this is really interesting. And um I I was really passionate about the environment back then. So I originally did my honours in um looking at the environmental impacts of tourism in Cradle Mountain, which is a very well-known tourism location in Tasmania. And then I went on and got a PhD scholarship in Queensland and I started to look at the impacts of tourism on communities up in the Dane Tree region. So I sort of sift shifted, I wasn't, but the whole time I was really interested in, you know, what is tourism, what uh what is the impact of tourism, why do people think that some things are tourism and others are not? Like how do we draw the boundaries around the edge of it? Um, and that's that that those sort of for travel plus watching my parents' experiences, I think really were really formative in how I proceeded with my career. Wow.

SPEAKER_01

Do they still have that fun?

SPEAKER_00

No, they sold it uh about 15 years ago. Yeah. Oh, okay. Maybe maybe a bit less. Yes, yeah, yeah. But it went, we went on to win many awards. They were they attracted the first um some of the first uh Asian tourists to Tasmania, would come particularly to pick fruit there, and they would also go up to Tim Parsons' farm, Coringa, which is well known in Tasmania, as you know. Um, and yeah, so that was they had a wonderful career in tourism. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Wow. Oh well, I'm glad you said they don't still have it because otherwise I would have been very dark on you for not knowing that I could go to your family's farm and pick fruit for the last nine years.

SPEAKER_00

Yes, no, it's gone.

SPEAKER_01

Oh, that's good. That sort of answers I was going to ask the question because I've had a few other guests that um, you know, take the gap year or um do some travel of some description when they're younger, um often because they don't know what it quite what it is they want to do with their life, so they just take some time out. But then they come back, they go on to work, you know, find a job as a tour guide or you know, some whereas you came back and decided to um do further research. So that sort of um paints a nice little picture as to why you m made that choice and from the influence of your parents. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Yes, yeah, I I think so. And I've just always like I've been I've always been quite a nerd at heart. Like I grew up loving reading and loving finding out new facts and and I just love that sort of lifelong learning and communicating findings, and I think yeah, it all came together. I was like, oh, hold on, I I don't want to own a business. I didn't my parents came to the point in time where they had to sell, and um, all of us children decided it that for the time in our lives it it it didn't suit us, so in a heartbreaking way it was let go and sold. Um, but I really realized that my passion was to try and help tourism through being a nerd and collecting data and sharing the results rather than actually running the business, I guess. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, an extroverted nerd, Anne. Absolutely. That's right. Yes, we we will get to. All right. So um I'm a bit of a Muppet when it comes to the world of academia, and I don't know a lot about how it works and how it's structured. So can you just talk to me like I'm nine? Um and talk me through your career as an academic, you know, over the years and and what that's looked like. And well, then we'll see where we land and we'll take it from there.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, sure. So I guess in terms of how academia works, is that as a student you can go through and you can exit it at multiple levels at or different levels. So, you know, most people will go through and they'll do an undergraduate and they'll leave with a degree. Um, then, but if you want to, you can go on and do masters, which is generally two years, or a PhD, which is generally sort of three to four years. And the whole idea with a PhD, I went straight from I went through a degree, then I did an honours thesis or honours year, which is one year that you can do if you kind of get a certain grade of mark. So I was lucky in that respect. I was a bit book smart and did all right and was got to go on. And then again, I did all right in my honours year, so then I could go on and do a PhD. I got a couple of scholarships up in Queensland. Um, and a PhD, the whole idea of a PhD is that it's a doctor of philosophy. Um, you you focus, and this becomes really important as to why academics are what they are. With a doctor of philosophy, it goes for about three to four years, and you really focus on one project. And the whole idea is that you develop new theory around a particular issue. So it might be, you know, how people make decisions, how to change people's behavior. Um, and in my particular case, my theory that I was looking at was um how do you uh keep uh grow tourism in communities, uh given that some people like tourism and some people don't. So I was kind of looking at how do you work out uh what the optimal level of tourism is in a particular community? So it's really, really nerdy. Um, but the whole idea of well, it is in a way because it's very theoretical. So for a researcher to put study a particular topic, they have to go right into the micro and they have to like study something in detail. And I think that's why people often think, oh, you know, academics, they're not very good at communicating. And often it's because they've had to focus right in, and right focusing right in on something and concentrating on it for four years is very different skill to actually communicating. So um, because you know, you're looking inward rather than outward, it's a completely different skill. So um, so yeah, so that's why I did did that, and then the whole idea now in academia is that you know, once you develop theory on a particular topic, then you can apply it to other locations. And then you can go, well, we know that this is the theory, so we'll we'll we'll run tourism in this particular way to try and achieve the goals that we want. So that's sort of how the intersection of uh how academic work academia works and the intersection between um research and the industry, I guess, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_01

Yes, it does make sense. Thank you. I don't think I realized it was three to four years.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, on one topic. It's destined to make you go absolutely nuts.

SPEAKER_01

Well, absolutely nuts, but then sh I think if I spent four years studying one topic, I would just feel like I'm the boss of the world on that topic.

SPEAKER_00

And well Yeah, you I mean you you really get to know it very well, I can tell you now. Um Um and yeah, you get this like big door stopping thesis that no one will ever read. Um well, yeah, you do you do.

SPEAKER_01

Can we so I'm gonna double click on that? So then that no one will ever read. So Yes.

SPEAKER_00

Yes, that's the problem.

SPEAKER_01

I mean, your what you've just said then and your topic sounds like uh everyone should be reading it.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_01

And that yeah, go on.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, yeah, I was gonna say, so what has happened was when I went through around two nine the late 90s and 2000s, back in the day it was a doorstopper. You produced a doorstopper thesis that no one ever read. But now I think universities are realizing you just can't operate like that. We have a you have to share what you're doing. And so now academics are being encouraged to actually not just produce a doorstopper, but actually to communicate their results. Um, and that I guess is what drives a lot of the stuff that I do now. That um I do a lot, I do training of academics now to try and teach them how to communicate their results well, or maybe even in the first place, how to communicate. Because, you know, in tourism, I think so many people we're great, we're often extroverted, we're great communicators naturally, but academics are not always like that. You know, they are the inward focused person who can focus very carefully on something which you must do to be a good academic. But then when you say, all right, go and communicate your results, speak in the media, write for the conversation, they're like, whoa, how do we do this? Um and um that's where universities are trying to gently push them at the moment and say, look, you need to be better at communicating, you need to engage better with your industry partners and get the message out of what you're finding to help them.

SPEAKER_01

And then is that changing, I guess, the framework of you know, that is that being included in in your studies as in how to, you know, if you're if you're spending four years becoming the boss of the world on a topic, are you are they are you also now like are they being taught to communicate better, or is that sort of where what you're saying you're coming in?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, so that's sort of where my work comes in. But overall, I think as a whole, academia is becoming better at uh at communicating, but there's a still lot a long way to go. So um through my career after I finished my PhD, I didn't realize, but the way that I I communicated was um was often quite different to other academics. And over time I've realized that that was a good thing because it allowed me to share my results and my findings with people. And I've realized after 20 years in the game, oh, I can share that knowledge. So now what I've been doing in my career is teaching academics how to communicate their results, their research well, um, how to engage better with industry partners because it used to be that academics would come to the tourism industry and say, I'm gonna do this study and I'm gonna do it on this, and the industry would be like, Whoa, but we don't want that. And now academics have been taught, no, no, don't you you don't approach tourism or the industry that you're working with in that particular way. You've got to listen to them first and then help them solve their problems. Um, and so it's been a complete uh change in the last 20 years as to how universities are working, and that's where I come in. I've been I'm very interested in helping helping academics get better at uh their communication.

SPEAKER_01

Well, because surely if I spent four years on something and kind of just thought that it was just gonna be filed away on a shelf somewhere, I think I would struggle to spend four years on something that was kind of not gonna go anywhere.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I think sort of in the olden days, like if you think, you know, hundreds of years ago about academics, they used to kind of go, you think of them at Cambridge and Oxford, they used to walk around in their capes and you know, just create knowledge. And back in the day, it was considered fine to do, you know, hundreds of years ago, it was considered fine to just study for the sake of studying. But now there's been this mind shift where we almost can't comprehend the fact that that would be acceptable. Um, so yes, it's totally different now.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Okay, thank you. I feel like that was a really great little masterclass, and I think that will be very beneficial for any listeners out there that are even remotely considering, you know, academia as a career path or are um uh inclined to um, you know, do further research or or further studies after an undergrad. So yeah, thank you. That certainly made it a little bit clearer, well, much clearer for me. Yeah. Um so I'm gonna come back to a couple of things you said there, but I'm gonna do that after you tell me a little bit more about your career journey. So yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, so yeah, so I went up to Queensland and did my PhD for three years in the Dane Tree. Um, and that was that was when I studied um how to understand what communities view as sustainable tourism.

SPEAKER_01

So and you you went and you were based there for three years?

SPEAKER_00

I was based in Brisbane, but I used to go up to the Dane tree every winter. Yeah, so I spent a long, long period of time interviewing a lot of the local people, tourism organizations, government, all sorts of things. Um, and I loved it. I really, really loved it. And uh so then after that, just as I was finishing my PhD, I was starting to think about what would happen, what to do next. And the University of Tasmania decided to start up teaching tourism to students for the first time ever. So I moved back to Tasmania for four years and worked um setting up the tourism program down here in Tasmania. Um, and then in the about 2004, I thought it was time for a change. And we had been on, I'd been on sabbatical, which is where you have a break from teaching and you're allowed to just focus for a few months on your research. And I was over in North America and I saw someone just passed me this piece of paper with a job, and it was in northern British Columbia. And at the time we were traveling about to go into British Columbia, and I was reading the map one on one side, and I didn't realise that if you flip the map over on the other side, British Columbia extended the same distance north. So it's a massive province, it's about 2,000 kilometres long.

SPEAKER_01

Sounds like something I would do.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, exactly. It's like, oops, it's big. Um, so yeah, I I thought, oh, this sounds crazy. It's remote, which I like, it's regional. Um, it had the highest percentage of Indigenous students at a university in Canada. The can the the university was started because the community actually petitioned and said we want a university, and it was a thousand kilometers north of Vancouver. Um, you used to get 16 feet of snow every year. Um, so we just decided, right, let's go for an adventure, go to Canada. And I went and worked at the that uh university there and and loved it. And I started doing research over there looking at uh big recreational vehicles, you know, these huge RVs that drive up and down the highway from America right up to um Alaska, and they call them snowbirds. Um, they're often retirees driving and hundreds of thousands of people, but no one wanted to study them because back in the day they thought they were old fuddy-duddies, freeloaders, not putting any money into the economy, and just worthless tourists. And I've always been interested in the kind of unknown and the underdog. And I was thinking, hold on a minute, there's they're all retirees, they're they're driving half a million dollar vehicles. Where are they going and what are they doing? So that I started to research that over in Canada. Wow. That's interesting. How long did you spend over there? I spent three years um studying living there and absolutely loved it. Uh, and then suddenly in 2007, we had to move back. Um, my sister and her daughter became very sick uh very suddenly and unexpectedly, and so overnight we moved home pretty much. Um so my life just changed, which was a really um pivotal moment. And uh for four years I had out of academia while I had kids um and was around the family, which um was really, really nice. Yeah. Um, but then when I came back to academia, I returned to Tasmania, had four years off, a job came up at the University of Tasmania again, and I started back working there again. And all the time that I was in Canada, I kept thinking to myself, I don't we never really know where people go. We actually don't know where people go. And then during that time, technology was getting better and better. So when I got back to Tasmania, I continued to study motorhood muses and van lifers and that type of thing. But as tech got better, that's when I thought, right, I wonder if we can design some technology. Myself and another professor, Richard Eccleston, got together over a bowl of hot chips, and we were like, why don't we see if we can create some technology that tracks where tourists go? And um we created this app that we asked tourists to put on their phone and um carry and show us where they went. We never expected it to work, um, and it did.

SPEAKER_01

And it turned out to be the world you didn't expect it to work like you didn't expect the technology to work, or you didn't expect that people would do it.

SPEAKER_00

Everything. Everything. You know, imagine you get off the air, you get off the plane, you're picking up your luggage at the carousel, a researcher comes up and says, Can I track you for the entire duration of your stay in Tasmania? I thought that people just go, no way. But we we we gave, you know, we asked and we were really honest about what we were doing. And they said yes. It was such a crazy study. They were like, Yeah, all right. We said we'll give you a map and show you everywhere we go, and you could share it on social media and um, you know, we'll keep your data private, which we did. And um we became the first group ever to track tourists around a destination for the entire length of stay. So suddenly we knew where people go. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

So um, did you have any background in tech? No.

SPEAKER_00

No. So I just okay, I just had an idea. Yeah, neither did Richard. Um, okay. Uh so we we got, you know, we got a tech provider down here who were fantastic. Um, I and I to digital. They were brilliant at um creating really beautiful solutions and apps and that type of thing. And we I I mean, through my research, I knew that it was becoming possible to track people. I knew that because, you know, you can see it on TV on homeland. They like track people and then they ping with drones. So I'm like, well, sure we could track tourists, but in a nice way. And we have to do it ethically. Hasn't anybody watched NCIS? Yes, exactly exactly. So we kind of knew, and we just collect we made this great team of researchers, put it together, and we just went for it and it worked, and it became bigger and bigger and bigger, and got more and more attention. Um, and yeah, we've we we tracked people's first time ever around the world with their consent, which was really important. Yeah. How was this funded? Uh, we got funding from a university and also from an organ it was uh that was that received funding from also from the state government, tourism industry council, uh yeah, so it was funded from all different places.

SPEAKER_01

Wow. And okay. I think it's a particular type of person and that just thinks that they're just gonna do this.

SPEAKER_00

Like yeah, I mean, I think the thing about I think the thing about researchers, um, many of them, um, many of the more modern like academics, is we're actually quite creative. You know, we kind of like researchers, a good researcher, I think, or creative researcher will always be pushing the boundaries of knowledge. So they'll be thinking, well, we don't know where people go. Like, you know, there's all these amazing surveys, but they don't actually tell us where they go. But we have the technology, so let's do it. So I think that's sort of I'm always interested in um pushing the boundaries of knowledge, but you know, um, through research, like designing new methods to answer questions. I love that's what I really love to do.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Okay. Very nerdy, very nerdy. You're an odd cookie, aren't you? You're an odd cookie. Very odd. Yeah. Um so the um that app was called Tourism Tracer, yeah? Yeah, that's right. Yeah, okay. And it's it's it's is it still are we still tracing tourists?

SPEAKER_00

No, no, it's finished now. I mean, like technology changes all the time. And, you know, at the time it was incredible technology, and now it's just normal. You know, we're all tracked every day of our life. The only problem is that that data is never actually released. Um, and that is what I have a problem with in tourism is that, you know, we are all tracked, tourists are all tracked, big large tech companies um will sell segments of that data, but we really as an industry uh we should be allowed to have way more data than we have to make decisions. Um, we have been forced, you know, the industry is often doing all this guesswork, you know. I wonder how long people actually stay in this new region where we have a new tourism product. They don't ever really know. But the big companies, you know, Google and Apple, they know exactly that data. And we can buy it. Um, organizations can buy it, but I would love to see that data a lot more accessible. Um, I think that's uh Australia. I think the challenge for Australia is that, you know, in other countries or like say Europe, for example, data is open and you can access data more freely, and that allows businesses to make decisions because you know, if we know that people are generally driving north and we're driving the left-hand side of the road, it means for a new business, you're gonna want to buy your property on the left-hand side of the north of the road to capture the visitors going north, you know. So um, you know, that's what I'd love uh uh data to be much more accessible for the industry. I'd love that.

SPEAKER_01

Is there any policy work? Uh is there any work being done on that? Do you know?

SPEAKER_00

Uh not a lot. No, not in terms of making it more open. Yeah, I think Australia's still in a um, you know, we're still very protective of our data.

SPEAKER_01

But maybe we need maybe the tourism tracer app needs to come back, Anne.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, well, that's right, in another form. But yeah, I'd love I would love it to come back.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Oh, it does seem silly. Yeah, that um the industry doesn't have that, what seems to be quite critical information.

SPEAKER_00

It's amazing. All right, so tourism tracer, what happens after that? Yeah, so well, tourism tracer was busy, you know, that kind of um got a lot of attention and I was really lucky. I got lots of invites to go and talk all around the world at different forums, at, you know, things like United Nations Environment Programme and it led to work with, you know, the Asia Development Bank, and it was a wild and amazing ride that took me right up to about um about COVID, really, and then obviously tracking people's all about mobility. Um, and there was no mobility in COVID. Um, but around that time I started becoming really interested in um in what does travel actually do to people, uh to their minds? Like, what does it actually does it change their behaviour? Like, can we actually change behavior through travel? And that's what I became interested in. And around that time, the Antarctic tourism industry was growing very rapidly, and the university had a big, fabulous team, but they didn't have a lot of tourism expertise. So I joined up with some amazing people at the university who were Antarctic specialists, and we started doing research down in Antarctica, um, looking at the growth of the industry because it's massive, rapid growth down there, but they're also doing some amazing things and also some not so amazing things with how they um guide the guests down there. So I was really interested in understanding if we take someone to Antarctica, can we send them home an ambassador or a steward? Um, and you know, can we can we change their behaviour from a travel experience and turn them into a more environmentally friendly person when they go home? And that took up um the last five years of my my work at the university until 2025. We went down there three times, um, interviewed a lot of tourists on board before going to Antarctica on their way home from Antarctica and then months later to see the impact that travel has on their on their mindset.

SPEAKER_01

Oh, yeah. Can we so what did you find, what did you find? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, well, I mean, again, it was that kind of theory back to the theory and everything, and applying these theories of behavior change to to it. And what we found was that um Antarctica is a is a really obviously a transformative place because it's the scenery, the fact that it takes two days, when you're down there, you can't turn back, it's a big travel experience. So that has an impact. But what we found was that if passengers were were getting out and and basically doing things with their hands and hearing things with their and seeing things and touching, well, not really can't touch the ice down there, but if they were experiencing things with their senses and getting involved, it had a profound impact on how they viewed Antarctica and the world. So for example, when you go down to Antarctica, you get the opportunity to go out on the often the uh on a science boat where you will help PhD students collect data. So it's called citizen science. And in one of them you can actually collect water. So when you collect these jars of water, they just they just look like water. And then we would go onto the ships and the guides would put the the water under the microscope. And one day we put the water under the microscope in Antarctica, and we could see blue plastic. And you just go, Oh my god, we've we've ruined our world. It's we've bugged it, you know. And and the passengers on board sang this too? Oh, they're just like oh, they were just aghast. Yeah. I mean, as well as seeing all these really cool little tiny animals, which was amazing. They also saw microplastics. Wow. And you know, it was just a jaw-dropping, heart thumping moment for those guests. And and then the the guides on the ships that we're on, some of the guides are amazing and sort of said, Well, this is what you can do about it. When you go home, you can do this and this and this. You can tell people about what you saw, you can, you know, change your behavior in this, this, and this way. So, what it really showed to us is that if you can give a guest a really profound experience that they're actively involved in, you know, if we're just sitting there getting reams of information, we don't take it in. But if we're we've got our hands busy and our minds are busy, and maybe we can smell things and we can see things, that's where you have these profound impacts of travel that can really transform the way in which people uh behave when they get home. And yeah, so that was it was really profound. It was an amazing experience. Um, and it was really exciting, exciting research to do. Because so many of the companies down there were really committed to it, which was great.

SPEAKER_01

Were they? Yeah. Good.

SPEAKER_00

Not all, but some, yeah, many. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Um oh that's quite shocking, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Um and so um what you're saying there is that if if uh the guests are actively involved, then you see changes in their behaviour when they return home.

SPEAKER_00

Yes, yeah, that's right. Not always, but often if they have the ability to change. You know, some people might go home to a country where there is no recycling, there are no options to do things. But then that is a that's a societal thing that might limit their ability to change, despite them wanting to. Um, but yes, uh, we could see that profound change. And, you know, that was there are theories of why that happens that, you know, if you yeah as I think I was talking to you about the other day, it's called the elaboration likelihood. Model, which is one of the theories, and it says that you know, when you're guiding, you can give people peripheral cues, like you know, you can wear a green shirt and look professional and have a you know sharp haircut and be a good speaker, and people will be likely to listen to you. But the central cues of that that's what the component of the guiding experience that has the profound shift on people's brains, and that's when you're actually challenging the way people think. And so when you saw that people saw that microplastic, they were like, Whoa, I thought it was clean down here and pristine, and it's not. And that's where you're challenging their belief systems and through central cues, and that's yeah, that's sort of nerdy academic and in practice.

SPEAKER_01

It's so interesting. Um and you know, uh, we're both mothers, so you know, um, when you're raising children, you know, you you know that you get better um buy-in from a child if they're being involved and you know getting tactile. And so it's really interesting to hear that that is um not just in childhood, but I can imagine that you probably wouldn't have seen the same results if the guests had been um hearing about microplastics. Yeah, if that were.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And another time we were down there and we the many of the ships that are down there, the newer ones are electric, so they're very quiet. So one night we had this thing, um, we called it like silence on seven, and we just asked the guides if we could have silence on deck seven. So we just said to everyone, we're just gonna be silent on this deck. Come outside, we're not gonna do anything. And so the ship was moving through this canal, and it was so quiet because it was electric. You could hear the penguins going out of the water. Um, you could hear the whales before you saw the blow of water. So they you could hear them making noises. Um, and that sort of makes people's spine tingle, and again, it's engaging the central senses and those central cues. And you know, I think as much as what we don't do, often what we what we do as is is important as what we don't do in tourism when we're guiding people. So those moments of very of quiet, um, you know, going still. We don't always have to fill the air with voices and sounds and information. Sometimes it's just being very quiet, and that's what has a really profound impact um on people's experience and therefore their behavior and their take home and their satisfaction and everything.

SPEAKER_01

This is disgustingly interesting, Anne. See, I told you being a nerd is a good thing. Oh, I am down. I I am yeah, I'm a I yeah, I I yeah, I love I love nerdiness. Um can I ask then, and you don't have to answer if you don't want to, but what what is your stance or um thoughts around tourism and Antarctica?

SPEAKER_00

Ah yeah, okay. So this is my stance. It's very similar to um tourism in World Heritage Areas, such as in Tasmania. So um Antarctica is governed by the Antarctic Treaty system. And in the Antarctic the Antarctic Treaty in itself, you can Google it, says that um Antarctica is a place for peace and cooperation, that no one is in charge, that everyone makes decisions collectively, and that at the heart of Antarctica there should be it's about science and a place for people to learn from. So I believe that if your form of tourism is centered around peace, collaboration, and teaching people science, then your business belongs down there. If your business is not doing that, and if you're making up an excuse to fit it around that, I don't believe it belongs down there. So it has to be that fr science, learning and discovery has to be at the core of what the tourism product offers. That's it. So it has to be it's educa highly educational and very, very special. I don't think that it should be, it's not a playground, it's not a place for bucket listing, even though people do go down their to bucket list, it's not about being the first person to, you know, I don't know, fly in a helicopter or it's not the first pla it's not a place for first, it's a place for deep science and learning, and that's what operators need to have. And many of them do. Many of them take it seriously, but not all of them do.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, it's good to hear. Um, thank you for answering that. You have obviously answered that before because it was very concise.

SPEAKER_00

Well, not at funnel, you should say that, not necessarily publicly. I don't often say it publicly, but I'm happy to say it. Yeah. I've done a lot of deep thinking about it, and that's where I've landed in the last only in the last year I've really kind of consolidated what I think about it.

SPEAKER_01

Oh well done. Thanks for that. And you know, our opinions are, you know, not never set in stone. Yeah, that's right. That's right.

SPEAKER_00

Absolutely. That's right.

SPEAKER_01

All right. So this largely takes us then to present day. Mm-hmm. Your care in your career journey.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Yes. So yeah, 2025, um, the university decided that it no longer had an appetite for tourism. And so um myself and other people were made redundant. So after 20 years in my career as a researcher, suddenly I found myself in a situation um being made redundant. Um, and that was probably the most challenging thing I've ever faced because I've had quite a successful career. So suddenly, boom, the the rug was out from under my feet. Um, and that was a massive challenge, I think. But I think it was, you know, it's been really great to go through that process as well, I think, because it forces you to reset. Um, and and during the the last few years, I'd become the chair of Destination Southern Tasmania, as you know. And for me, that was um one of the greatest honours of my life, seriously, because um I was voted into that position by the industry. So I was like, okay, you know, maybe there is a place in the world for a nerd like me in this tourism industry. And that was um, that's been absolutely so important for the last few years. And through the process of, you know, the the university saying, look, we don't want to do tourism anymore, um, that was really the joy of my week. So I continued on with that. And and what it made me realize was that I need to have a break and I need to reset. Um, and so I'm just having a little break at the moment um and looking around at different opportunities. Um, but what it also made me realise is I'm so passionate about sharing knowledge, like I absolutely love it. And in my role as the chair, what I can do is often I can distill data sets, I can um bring like you know, knowledge from other places and share it with the board or the whoever wants to hear it. Um, and the transfer of knowledge is really my passion. So that led me to starting up my business, uh, restarting Omanica, which I've had sort of registered for a long time was in hibernation. And so now what I'm doing is training academics um in how to do really impactful research and engage with with communities, whether it's the tourism or agricultural, scientific or medical community. So I'm sort of training them to become better communicators from the get-go. And I'm also um doing a little bit of um tourism consulting as well to help destinations um that might sort of need a bit of help with doing doing their research. So it's been um a really interesting time in my career and very, very challenging, but but it I've done, I've just learned so much about what I love and what I'm really passionate about. So I feel like um while these things happen, and I know that many of your people you've interviewed talked about redundancies and changing jobs and losing jobs, and yeah, it's been an incredible process to go through. Um but I think it's made me a lot more um, a lot more compassionate, but a lot more reflective on what I might be able to do for the next part of my career.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, it's such an emotional roller coaster, isn't it? You know, when when something so life-changing is sort of thrust upon you and you have no, yeah, no say absolutely no control.

SPEAKER_00

You don't have any control over it at all. And you know, at the end of the day, um, universities are big businesses and they have to make big decisions. Um, we may not agree with the decision at all, um, but we just have to go go with it. And the same happens in in big business. Um, and so, but I yeah, I think it's sort of a good process to go through because it forces you to think passionate, you know, what am I really passionate about? And what do I, what brings me a lot of joy? Um, and uh I think that sort of knowledge transfer and you know, working with the industry gives me huge amounts of joy. So at the moment I'm just I'm having 2026 is at least the half first half of it is my year of a radical sabbatical. Um I'm just doing, yes, I've called it radical sabbatical. Did you turn this coin this term? No, I actually heard it. Apparently, it's a big travel trend that's going around at the moment. Okay. Um, and it's when middle-aged people take long periods of time off work. And I'm like, yeah, and I thought, right, I'm gonna have one of them. And it's that's been good in that I can I'm just kind of having it a time off, doing work that I love, um, doing things that I love, and just have giving myself a bit of time and space.

SPEAKER_01

Right. So I'd like to um just ask you then. So for listeners that are contemplating an academic career, could be young listeners or um career changers or people that want to at any age. Do you have any tips, thoughts, um, recommendations for them?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I think the like for any any level, whether you're drawing a degree or whether you want to go back and do like a PhD or master's, it has to be something you're passionate about. You know, I think so many people are driven by careers and money when they're making their decisions on what to study. Um, but I think it has to be passion because if you don't love it, you're not gonna do really, really well at it, you know, like and um it's particularly like say for um re people in who are listening, the listeners who are kind of, you know, middle, upper management, say, you know, they've moved through their career, they've done pretty well, but they're thinking, oh, maybe I want to go back and do more study. If you do something you're really passionate about, you're gonna do really well. So I think you know, that's the most, the most important thing. And then I think if you're thinking about like wanting an actual academic career, academic careers are really, really tough. They're really cutthroat. You have to work a lot of extra hours um, you know, publishing and you know, writing, you're always having to be writing books and papers and all that type of thing all the time, ruining money. There's a lot of pressure in it. Um, so that's a high, that's a difficult career space at the moment to be in. But I mean, I'll still love it. Um but it's not for everyone. But yeah, I think that passion, like being passionate when you're going to choose something to study is just is so important. Um the job will come later, but the passion will come out of when you talk about your topic when you're being interviewed, and yeah, it's uh you you've got to be passionate about something to do it and study it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

When you're um researching, you know, I I guess human behaviour or you know, how tourism or travel impacts human behaviour from a career perspective or a workforce perspective, but also very much so from a business or entrepreneurial perspective. Yes. Understanding the human behaviour using the example for as you just said about Antarctica. Yes. Surely there's some kind of correlation there for business planning or even um RTOs or government bodies strategically look at workforce planning. Okay, good. I feel like you're I feel like maybe you're making a little bit of sense.

SPEAKER_00

Yes. No, no, exactly. Um the workforce planning is more difficult, but I'm thinking like the for taking those sort of theories of behavior change and putting them into tourism, I think, and or maybe getting people skilled up in those theories, there's a huge um, it's hugely important and hugely relevant for tourism. It ranges from if you go into a meeting and you understand theories of behavior change, you can apply them and make your argument more clear. Because if you understand, for example, there's a one which is called the theory of behavior change, and there's also nudging theory. So the theory of the behavior change says that if you want to change someone's behavior or opinion, so you're going into pitch to your boss, you want to say, I want to have a new project. I need, I think we need this new thing going on. The theory says that if you understand where people are coming from, like their belief systems, they form their attitudes and they form their behavior. Um their yeah, their behaviors. So when you're going to your boss, for example, and you're saying, I want to start this new initiative, if you can understand the boss's belief system about, for example, you're going to go to the boss and say, I think we need to put our staff through training. Say you realize that your boss actually was never trained through academic, doesn't have any sort of qualifications, their belief system might be that education is really useless. So rather than going in and saying, We have a new training course, I think we should put the staff through it, you start with why you think training is important. So the understanding behavior change theory can help you with communication. For the tourism industry, I think we need to use it more in how we train our guides and how we train people at the front, front face, you know. So whether it's in the concierge or um at the airport, um, or whether it's as a guide, again, behavior change theories can help us communicate things, knowing that people are stressed because their belief is when they're in the plane, they're gonna die. So that's why they write their rude and obnoxious, for example. So rather than tackling with a rude and obnoxious behavior, you go back and you you you work with the behavior and the fear. So I think there's right through the workforce, there is a there's an opportunity to use theories like that in tourism. Um and in terms of yeah, training. Yeah, very it's does that is that answering your question? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Um I'm not gonna go off on a whole other tangent, but I really do want to, but I won't. Um but it just made me oh also so in staff training, but also you could use that theory and just the visitor experience as a whole. And if you take the airport example, you know, knowing that that's how people are coming through the door, um, designs their airport experience uh around that or yeah, that's really absolutely that's right.

SPEAKER_00

And then um my colleague Sarah Dolniker up at the University of Queensland, she's doing this research on nudge theory, and it's just how do you change people's, how do you nudge people to change their behavior when they're actually traveling? So you don't want long-term change, you just want to change it when they're there. So for example, when you're staying in a hotel room, how can you encourage people to turn the lights off when they leave the room? How can you encourage them to not have their um room cleaned every day? And you know, the nudge again, she now knows through her research that things like signs and that type of thing, that don't really work. But she uses things like financial incentives and that works better because people get something back to benefit themselves personally. So that's why if you want to nudge someone's behavior just in the short term to change how they use, move around a room or something. Um, you don't want to change their behavior long term, it's just right now. She's working on how to how to do that. And so there's so many useful ways that you can apply it in in tourism, understanding how people make decisions when they travel and why. Um, and yeah, I think there's a lot of opportunity for it in in in tourism. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Okay, thank you. Yeah. Um right, one last thing then, just on that, and then um we'll wrap it up. But because all I'll go back to what we were saying at the beginning, but like that research that she's doing, your colleague is doing is w we need it. And I say we being the tourism industry need it. So if you're working with um academics on how to communicate better, um what about from the other side then? And yeah, like what about operators knowing that the this research even exists, or is that a byproduct of getting the um academics to communicate better?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Look, I think it's it's from both it's from both sides. So um if you're an if you are an operator, say you're got an interest in something. So um oh I'm just thinking of the Tasmanian example, actually, which is not to do with an operator. So recently in Tasmania we had this big contentious proposal for a stadium. So what you can do, any member of the public can go onto Google and they can type in Google Scholar, and that brings up this new uh page, and you can put your keywords in, you can find all the research that's ever been done in that particular area. So, for example, with me, I was like, hmm, several years ago, there's a proposal for a stadium. So I went in and said, you know, my keywords were economic benefits of a new stadium. And I could see all the previous research that had ever been done. So that's one thing that operators can do. If they're just interested in accessing information, but if they have a problem, like say you're an operator or you're a regional tourism organization, you have an issue that you're dealing with, what you can do is approach um researchers that you've you've seen who are good communicators that you kind of feel like you might resonate with, or if you don't know them, you can just write to your local university and say, we have this problem. We would we're wondering if your researchers would be interested in helping us work on it. And often researchers would be very interested in doing it. Um, sometimes they can, sometimes they can't. Sometimes they need money to fund it. Um, if it involves, you know, travel and resources and that type of thing. Sometimes they don't. More often than not, these days they do need a little bit of money. But they can often go for grants as well and say, all right, you know, I'm doing for work for um this group of uh businesses. They're all small and medium enterprises. Um they're they're funding, they can't fund a big project. So the researcher can go out and try and access funds to do the research for them. So there's, you know, from the industry perspective, you can just write to um write to universities and say, this is what we want to you, local universities, and often the university might be interested in helping out. But I think from the researchers' perspective, their their challenge is that researchers need to get better at communicating their research. Increasingly they are they are, but they need to be writing when we publish in academic articles. We write in this kind of really weirdo high English academic language. It's just so unpalatable for the majority of people in the world. And so I my thing is in my training is that researchers need to be bilingual. So they need to be able to talk the nerd talk to get published, but they also just need to be able to talk at an industry level in plain English without the boring theories to explain the findings and the relevance of it. So that's sort of where I come in trying to train them up to be better communicators. Many of them now are. Like, for example, my colleague in Queensland, Sarah, she's a wonderful communicator. So many of the modern ones are, but it's still a big, big challenge in academia to get everyone good at communicating. That's that's kind of my mission at the moment is to improve that communication.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, well, I guess it um it's probably better, you know, makes more sense to tackle it from that side because you know it's one thing if an operator identifies that they have a problem. But like for example, with the nudge theory that you've just uh um mentioned, like that's not necessarily a problem that um an operator might realize that they have, but it's just an additional um additional research that they can use to improve the product or the outcome. Um so yeah, they might not necessarily know that there even is something like I'm I'm thinking of tour guides, you know, and um very elaborate theory that you mentioned before, which I can't remember what it was called. What is it?

SPEAKER_00

Oh, that was elaboration like and theory of gland behavior and behaviour change. Yeah, that's right. They roll right off the tongue, Ann.

SPEAKER_01

Absolutely easy, easy, yeah, yeah. But you might not uh, you know, as someone that owns a tour guiding business, you realize that this is something that you could implement. So I guess the communications um improvement coming through from academics.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Um that's right. I think, yeah, improving communication. And then I mean the other thing that like, you know, regional tourism organizations and tourism industry councils and organizations can do is invite academics to come and run a workshop on the coolest research we've done in the last year. Yeah, you know, and have a workshop where people can go along and hear and then they can sort of cherry pick what they like and don't like. So I think we can go we can go both ways, um, I think. But yeah, that you can't expect operators to know about all the theories that drive behavior change or whatever it may be. And similarly, you can't expect academics to know all the theories either. But I think if we had that kind of more integrated, you know, like yeah, conferences, maybe we have a yearly workshop that um the industry and government and rese uh research bodies can get together and share their coolest research. I just love that to see that happening um just once a year. It doesn't have to be much, maybe for a couple of hours. They just talk for five minutes because also with the government. I mean, the government collects amazingly cool research that the industry often doesn't know about.

SPEAKER_02

Right.

SPEAKER_00

Um, and so do so do professional organizations as well. So I would just love to see more more sharing and more openness is everyone will improve. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, yeah, wholeheartedly agree.

SPEAKER_01

Okay, my friend, have you um got anything that we haven't discussed that you would like to throw in at the end here before we wind up? Uh nope.

SPEAKER_00

I think it's been I've really enjoyed it. It's been fantastic, and I really appreciate you inviting me and listening to my nerd talk. No way, Ann.

SPEAKER_01

I um didn't want to say at the beginning because I didn't want to give you a big head, but I fangirled over you like long before I worked for DST. So I remember I remember getting the I remember getting the phone call asking me to come in for an interview and saying it would be with Ann Hardy and I nearly died. And I can I'm gonna say this right now, and any DST colleagues that might be listening shove it. But I nearly didn't walk in the door to that interview. I was so nervous. So it's a bit of a uh bit of a um full circle pinch me moment a couple of years later to be you know having such a candid conversation with you.

SPEAKER_00

Oh thank you. That's very, very kind. Um I'm humbled. I'm humbled, but um no, and I mean you rocked that interview, like I was saying as well. So there you go. You taught with it's mutual teaching, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, mutual adoration.

SPEAKER_01

Oh holy moly, can I have that? I'll get you to put that in writing.

SPEAKER_00

Um I will, I will.

SPEAKER_01

Well, thank you, Anne. It's been an absolute delight. And this is um yeah, this has been actually a real masterclass for listeners on a variety of topics here. Um so yeah, I'll be making sure to spread this bar and wide and um include your uh LinkedIn profile in the show notes um so people can connect with you and and keep an eye on what you're up to. And yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Thanks, Carmen. Yeah, it's been a pleasure to be on. I love your podcast. So I've got lots of fangirl moments going on now just from listening to all the other people. So yeah, it's been fantastic. It's such an important thing. So I really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01

Oh, thank you. Thank you for taking the time. All right, pleasure. I'll see you later.

SPEAKER_00

Pleasure. Okay, see you.

SPEAKER_01

Bye. My oh my, thank you so much, Professor Anne Hardy, for taking the time to chat with me this week. Um, I will be watching Anne very closely. I could have kept this conversation going for such a long time, but um, I think all of this research that's happening in the world of academia is um so interesting. I absolutely love it. And I am cheering you on, Anne, to um close that gap between academia and industry because I what what is the point of spending three or four years being an expert on something and researching one particular topic so deeply to then have it sit on the shelf? So thank you so much, Anne. That was truly a delightful conversation, and I hope you all agree with me. So please, if you enjoyed the episode, share it with your colleagues and friends. The tourism industry deserves to be seen as a reputable and viable career choice, and my mission with the podcast is to help the tourism industry be seen in that light. As always, I'd love to connect with you on LinkedIn, so look me up. Feel free to message me if you think you would be a good guest on the show or you know somebody who would. And of course, make sure you hit one of those buttons. Follow, download, share, subscribe, or all of the above. Until next time, let's all remember that tourism matters. I'll see you next week. Thank you for listening.