The purpose of this article is to describe and document the nascent state of hospitality in colonial Victoria from the 1830s until the gold rushes of the 1850s. The primary source of such an account is the personal journal of a public servant, George Augustus Robinson, the Chief Protector of the Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate Department, perhaps the European with the most experience of travelling throughout the Port Phillip District. Accounts from other contemporary sources are used to complement Robinson's observations. Where accommodation houses were available, they were often crude establishments offering poor fare for travellers. The most comfortable accommodation was to be had on squatting runs, some of which had purpose-built huts for travellers. In some cases, hospitality meant sleeping with strangers, sharing beds with one other occupant or sleeping on shakedowns or mattresses on floors with numerous people. However, beyond the limits of settlement, travellers had to make their own arrangements, utilising abandoned Aboriginal shelters or shepherd huts, pitching their own tents, or simply sleeping on the ground wrapped in a blanket using a saddle or a log for a pillow.

This study was conducted to explore leisure motivations with regard to tourist attractions. A survey of a convenience sample of residents of Melbourne, Australia, was conducted. The sample was then segmented based on the likelihood of visiting a cross-section of Melbourne's tourist attractions in the next 6 months. Analysis using Unger and Kernan's (1983) Subjective Leisure Scale (SLS) was then undertaken to explore whether there were differences across the segments in terms of their leisure motivations. The results highlight that, within this context, intrinsic satisfaction, perceived freedom and arousal emerged as stronger underlying dimensions of motivations to visit tourist attractions, rather than mastery, spontaneity and involvement. This information provides insights for marketers of tourist attractions with regard to what residents are seeking when they visit local tourist attractions. The information can be used to develop more positive experiences at tourist attractions for this important sector of the market.

In recognition that they largely control the context in which legalised gambling is operated, state governments in Australia have taken an increasingly active role in encouraging the gambling industry to implement responsible gambling practices. In the state of Queensland, the government introduced the voluntary Queensland Responsible Gambling Code of Practice in May 2002. This article reports part of a larger study investigating gambling providers' awareness of this Code, their implementation of its provisions and their views on its likely effectiveness in hotels, casinos and clubs in certain case study areas in remote, regional and urban Queensland. This article draws only on data for the selected regional area, Townsville. Semistructured interviews with managers and staff in 12 venues revealed mixed awareness of the Code, limited implementation of its component elements and variable support for its likely effectiveness. However, a committed group of five venue managers was much more proactive in implementing the Code than those in the remaining venues and much more supportive of its potential effectiveness. These five venues — two clubs, two hotels and the casino — subsequently formed a responsible gambling consultative committee, a regional network initiated by the local Centacare welfare agency. The experience of this committee points to numerous benefits that such a network can provide in addressing regional challenges regarding responsible conduct of gambling. As such, this study highlights some of the possible facilitators and challenges in implementing responsible gambling practices in regional areas, particularly those with similar characteristics to Townsville.

This article summarises a case study investigating the relationship between a disastrous forest fire and the local tourism industry. During the summer of 2003, the region of Kelowna in British Columbia experienced an unusually severe forest fire that required evacuation of over 26,000 people, destroyed 238 private homes, caused a major disruption of the region's main tourism season, and destroyed several major tourism attractions. A case study was undertaken to examine how prepared Kelowna's tourism industry was for such a disaster, how the tourism industry responded to the disaster, what impact the disaster had on the different sectors of the tourism industry, and what lessons were learned. A survey of 104 local tourism businesses was conducted, as well as a review of government and organisational reports and the analysis of 175 media articles covering the fire. This article highlights some of the findings.

In the past two decades, there have been 76 published articles that have segmented tourist samples into clusters (Jackson, Inbakaran, & Schmierer, 2003). The principal aims of such research are to better understand tourist characteristics, to identify key variables that predict tourist behaviours, to assess the value of tourism to an area, to provide knowledge to help develop facilities in designated areas, and to allow tourism marketing to plan strategies such as promotion and product development. In contrast, researchers have appeared to assume that the host population is homogeneous and has a uniform response to an increase in tourist numbers and to future sustainable tourism within the community. This research study used a cluster analysis to segment the host community into four cluster groups. Demographic variables constituted the cluster base. These four cluster groups differed from each other on gender ratio, age, life cycle stage, education, migration status, occupation and current involvement with tourism. A further analysis demonstrated that these cluster groups significantly differed from each other in terms of both attitude towards current tourist numbers and future tourism development. The results of this study are discussed in terms of exploring the underlying causes of both positive and negative attitudes of hosts toward tourism. This research highlights differing attitudes present in various community groups and explores implications for the tourist industry.

The research reported in this article explores why consumers choose to book their travel arrangements with travel agencies in regional settings. Consumers can now access online bookings for airlines, accommodation, transportation, sightseeing tours and other related products, so why do they still go to travel agencies for reservations? This article identifies the attributes consumers seek in a travel agency or consultant and determines the relative importance of these in their selection process. The research was conducted in two stages. The first stage was a series of in-depth interviews with 10 travel agency users and three travel consultants. The second stage was a mail-out survey of 400 users of travel agencies in the Darling Downs area of Queensland, Australia. Despite its regionality, the region is a significant consumer of travel with approximately eight agencies in the city of Toowoomba alone. The in-depth interviews highlighted the need to de-emphasise two particular agency attributes, agency promotion and adequate brochure provision, from the research questions and replace these with parking and travel reward programs as factors worthy of investigation. Survey results revealed that there were 12 significant attributes impacting on consumer selection and, of these, the most important were the knowledge and experience of consultants, and the helpfulness and friendliness of consultants. Of particular note was that these attributes related to the consultant and not the agency per se. Travel reward programs were seen as the least influential in this research.

The debate over the adequacy of competency-based training (CBT) to meet the needs of service industries is far from over. In Australia, the national training package qualifications (which are CBT based) are well entrenched, with competency elements growing like bacteria on a buffet. Developed by industry for industry, this framework appears to have had little impact on training practices in the workplace. Enterprise training is not linked to the National Training Framework (Smith, Oczkowski, Noble, & Macklin, 2002). In colleges, atomistic customer service outcomes delivered in standardised, context-free conditions do little to meet the needs of service industries, tourism and hospitality in particular. Sociocultural approaches point to the context embeddedness of workplace learning, including the diversity of social interactions within the organisation and with customers. The industry is also a dynamic one, with ongoing changes to the tourism product (which includes service) to meet increasingly sophisticated expectations. Customers, including international visitors whose contribution is one of the country's largest sources of foreign income exchange, are looking for unique and culturally authentic experiences. Curriculum reform is an urgent priority if vocational training in colleges and workplaces is going to meet the emerging needs of this competitive services sector.

A range of stakeholders should inform planning processes if these processes are to be consistent with best practice principles. This article examines the case of the Twelve Apostles Visitor Centre, a tourism development proposed to be located in a National Park in Victoria, Australia. Limited opportunities were provided for meaningful stakeholder input during the planning phase. Despite the prevailing view among all major parties that some development of facilities would be appropriate, an absence of genuine consultation was experienced prompting a substantial redesign of the development concept as originally conceived (in 1996) and project delays which postponed the commencement of the development into 2000 by which time a new state government was in place.