Nic Cooper is a Regenerative Tourism Specialist at The Tourism Collective but is also a small business owner on the Mornington Peninsula. He has extensive experience spanning destination marketing, product development, and customer engagement with a particular passion and expertise for sustainable and regenerative tourism.
Visit Northern Tasmania CEO, Tracey Mallet, sits down with Nic at the 2023 Tasmanian Tourism Conference where he delivered a Day 1 workshop about regenerative tourism.
For those not aware of regenerative tourism, Nic says it can mean different things to different people, however he essentially boils it down to ‘doing tourism for good’. It’s all about going beyond sustainability and instead having a long-term positive impact on the community and environment. The benefits of regenerative tourism are all-encompassing, but for tourism businesses particularly, it can help attract more customers as well as making you more marketable. This is especially important for Tasmania as it manages the balance between protecting the things that make it different and growing the visitor economy.
Tracey and Nic delve into the tips and tricks on how tourism businesses can enter the regenerative tourism space, and the key piece of advice is to simply make a start. Nic says it’s about progress, not perfection. It’s not a tick-box exercise, but continuous work. Ask yourself the question, ‘what are the negative impacts of our business and how can we change them into a positive?’ Start with the short-term, immediate changes you can make and then map out the middle to long-term goals.
Today’s episode is brought to you by our partner, Hype TV. As a complete production house, Hype has the capability to facilitate the entire production process from concept creation through to media delivery. Hype’s core production team consists of industry professionals with decades of experience, and they also have an extensive network of production crews across Tasmania to tailor to your needs. Thanks to Hype TV for their generous support of TICT and for helping to make this episode of Talking Tourism possible.