2019/20 saw a design refresh of Tourism Australia’s owned platforms to leverage the Philausophy brand campaign. The refresh included new typography, layouts and photography styles, as well as adopting a mobile first approach to improve user experience. Foundational updates to the marketing technology platform were also completed, including the translation of over 700 pages of content into eight languages.

Australia.com and Australia.cn visitation numbers dropped in 2019/20 primarily due to international marketing campaign activity being paused due to bushfires and COVID-19. Despite this drop in site visitation, Tourism Australia’s owned platforms became a core resource for supporting the industry and travellers during the bushfires and pandemic, with digital marketing focused on building new utility tools to promote travel safety.

With significant misinformation about the extent of Australia’s bushfires across global media, we created an interactive bushfires map to show the true impact of the fires. The map highlighted some of the most popular Australian tourism destinations visited by international tourists, indicating whether they had been affected by bushfires or were safe to visit. The map was updated daily, and served as an important factual resource for travellers, industry and media. The bushfire map received 91,000 unique visitors with over 121,000 sessions and 280,000 page views and coverage in publications such as Forbes (USA), Washington Post (USA), Straits Times (Singapore and Malaysia) and The Telegraph (UK).

In response to COVID-19, an Australian ‘travel status’ map was created to assist travellers and industry navigate travel restrictions and the reopening of state and territory borders. The map is currently designed predominantly for domestic travellers, with 38,000 unique visitors at 30 June 2020. An evolution of the map to a detailed COVID-19 travel and safety portal is in planning and development to ensure information is ready and available for international travellers when international borders re-open.