Meet Liz Ward, Founder of Tourism Tribe

Meet Liz Ward – the co-founder and CEO of Australian-based Tourism Tribe, a platform recently launched to help small tourism business operators and people who work in regional tourism across the world to engage their customers.

Liz Ward is a member of our Brisbane, Australia Travel Massive Chapter. Prior to co-founding Tourism Tribe, she held the role of CEO of the Australian Tourism Data Warehouse (ATDW), which provides a database of over 35,000 Australian tourism product listings.

What is Tourism Tribe all about?

Tourism Tribe is a global online learning community connecting tourism operators with digital specialists so they can improve their businesses by using technology in smart ways. Members have access to DIY learning tutorials, member forums, online training sessions and the ability to hire experts. Our team is based across Australia, with us all working remotely – a true online business.

PS: Liz has offered Travel Massive members a discounted annual membership. Visit tourismtribe.com/travelmassive for more information about their offer.

Who is Tourism Tribe created for?

We’ve set it up for small tourism business operators and people who work in regional tourism across the world. We have over 350 members now after launching the platform in July 2015. 

What inspired you to create Tourism Tribe?

Co-founder, Fabienne Wintle (online entrepreneur and previous owner of Untanglemyweb) and myself have been brainstorming for years about a solution for regional tourism to enable them to access support and skills improvement in digital marketing. We are driven by business improvement in regional tourism and developing destinations and we’re big believers in the social benefits that come from marketing and productivity improvement through technology.

What makes Tourism Tribe different than other tourism businesses today?

Tourism Tribe is a unique combination of B2B online community and membership services aimed entirely at growing digital skills in the industry.  

We’ve seen amazing contributions from digital experts in our member forums, providing their tips and advice on many different digital marketing topics for free.  We’ve ‘ejected’ people from the platform when they’ve overtly sold their services eg. booking systems, but then we’ve seen business relationships occur as a result of the generous advice through forums and we’re happy about that.  If a member hooks up with an SEO expert or web developer as a result of conversations in the forums, then everyone’s a winner, but the members haven’t been “sold at”.  

What have you achieved at the Australian Tourism Data Warehouse and how has that helped get you where you are today?

I am so grateful for my 10 year stint as CEO of the ATDW and being the project director of its creation. We really were pioneering at the beginning with regard to content management on a large scale for an entire country and I’m proud that we never relented or compromised when it came our commitment to quality content. 15 years since the product listings went live on www.Australia.com, the database is 30,000 rich listings strong covering all regions of the country and is still the backbone of the national DMO’s website.  

One of the biggest challenges in managing the ATDW was the stakeholder landscape with a revolving door of leaders in the DMOs and the work I had to do to keep them on the same vision for the product and to keep them funding it. I learned a lot about collaborative strategy development and facilitation of product plans in my time there.

How is your brand changing the future of the industry?

Providing a good customer experience is also about the online customer journey. At each stage of the travel purchase cycle your destination or business is being tested in the customer’s mind to decide whether they want to spend their next 30 valuable seconds engaged with your content, social media page, booking system etc, or not.

Tourism Tribe is all about empowering tourism operators and DMO staff to firstly understand that customer service is just as important online as it is in a physical experience sense and what best practice looks like.  We motivate them to create a vision of great online customer service and enable them with knowledge and support tools to implement best practice.  

Where do you think digital marketing is headed for the tourism industry? 

I think the content switch is just turning and I believe the DMOs are finally getting it. I think they’re realizing that they have to be strategic and targeted with their content efforts.

I think we’re going to see a lot more sophistication in the way DMOs create and co-ordinate content for their regions.  

The current lament from industry is “I don’t have time to create content and manage social media platforms”, but they know it’s important. The bottom line is that if tourism businesses don’t embrace digital marketing, they should look to get out of their business. If they don’t have time to learn and do it themselves, then they need to hire someone to do it for them.

What’s been your experience so far and do you have any tips for finding and securing investors or gaining traction in the industry?

We’re fortunate to have a strong industry and government network. We’ve been so appreciative of the support we’ve received from industry leaders and DMOs who’ve been happy to recommend Tourism Tribe to local operators. We’ve volunteered our skills and time into the set up of the platform and have very supportive partners who believe in us and what we’re doing.

We’ve avoided Government grants and any financial support from Government. We are committed to moving quickly and being adaptive to our customers’ needs, so our model is a commercial, market based model. If we offer unique value, the industry will buy what we supply.

We’ve been careful with regard to our membership pricing model as we never wanted one small tourism operator to tell us that what we are providing is too expensive and at $10 a month, they don’t. So for us it’s a volume game and over time, based on the current take-up rate, the platform will pay for itself and we’ll be able to continue to invest in it to make sure it keeps up with market expectations.

“Tourism Tribe coach and etourism expert, Despina Karatzias, with Tribe member from the Queensland gemfields.”

Travel Start-Up is a monthly series that profiles unique online travel start-ups in the Travel Massive community around the world. Connect with Liz Ward and TourismTribe on Travel Massive, Facebook and Twitter.