Kerrel Draft Story

Our Goal is to build our knowledge about our region, how are our activities and experiences impacting the environment, community and our people?

Our Goal is to measure anything that will indicate a good balance of healthy tourism in our region. When travel and tourism activities are planned and executed with the impact on communities and commerce in mind, tourism as an industry can live up to its potential as a great catalyst for economic, social and environmental prosperity.

The 360 Model is a living, constantly adapting destination indicative management tool. Different to a plan, which is  written in one moment of time and can easily become out of date.

The Shoalhaven 360 is designed to simultaneously monitor the impacts of tourism and indicate how we are tracking against the limits that our community consider as a healthy community, economy, visitor experience and environment.

Happening Now

We Have the Power to Monitor Our Future, and We’re Doing Something About It

Firstly, we define as a community what we believe healthy tourism in the Shoalhaven should look like and we call these our ‘Optimal Conditions’. Essentially, these are things that are important values to us, both as a community and an industry, across four key cornerstones; visitor experience; economy; environment and community.

The second part of the project, the 360 Model itself, seeks to put measures in place to assess and indicate how we are performing against each Optimal Condition. The indicative model is in it’s early stages. Some of these measurements can be viewed via the ‘Learn More About 360’ button below.

Lastly, what do we do if things are not going well? The Model also seeks to set up a predefined and agreed set of actions if the monitoring falls outside what we have identified as healthy. We call this Adaptive Management.

Shoalhaven Tourism is currently proposing that we set up a Working Group of key stakeholders to meet a few times a year to review the model date and agree to work together on Adaptive Management actions.

What Is Healthy?

Healthy tourism in our region should:

• Ensure viable, long term business growth, employment and investment in the region making sure we have jobs across a range of sectors that are all year round.
• Respect the authenticity of our local host towns and villages, conserving our built and living cultural heritage, traditional values and contributing to inter-cultural understanding and tolerances.
• Make optimal use of environmental resources that constitute a key element in tourism development, maintaining essential ecological processes and helping to conserve natural heritage and biodiversity.

About Our Optimal Conditions

What we, as a Community Value as Important optimal conditions.