Australia

Rob and Danny were excited to welcome Shirley Rourke from GoWay Travel to talk about Australia!

Shirley Rourke surely is a passionate travel industry veteran, has specialized in the South Pacific for over 25 years.

After working in several sectors of the industry that includes education, inbound, retail and wholesale, Shirley found her home and go away for the past 17 years. Shirley's traveled extensively internationally and has enjoyed many trips to the South pacific for both business and for pleasure. Her role as vice president allows her to fully embrace her passion for all things South pacific. Surely welcome to the show. Thank you. We are glad to have you. So let's talk about Australia. So for families that are wanting to visit Australia for maybe the first time and they're intent on tackling the entire country at one time, which is ambitious.

I know, but what strategy would you suggest maybe like hub in spoke or going city to city? What's the best strategy to try to tackle the entire country on one visit? Okay, first of all, I would suggest that they really think about what their interests are, what activities they enjoy and really try to make sure that they incorporate all those things and those activities into their trip so that it can be completely customized to their particular interests and needs and wants. So it's good to say, oh we want to see this, this and this, but try and incorporate those activities and interests in so that they can truly make their trip to Australia really there's sure.

And we talked a little bit beforehand about some clients of mine that went to see went to New Zealand and they based their entire trip on a visit to the Wellington Zoo. So it can be any number of things that I would imagine to what you said, make the trip their own. Absolutely. And if you want to try to learn how to surf, put that in and we'll put it in along the way. As far as choosing where to start. It does depend on how long you have.

But at minimum what people will always want to do is see the highlight of Sydney and of course the great barrier reef. So those are two of the main things that they want to see. And then from there start to add in the extra activities that they want to see. The other areas that they want to see once they tell us the areas that they want to see and experience is that they want to do experts like go away. We'll put it together based on what airfare makes the most sense.

And we'll also talk about what makes sense according to weather. And we'll talk about whether a little bit later on. So it really looking at an itinerary that makes the most sense based on geography and airfares because there will be some flying involved. Well that brings us to the length of stay. If you're trying to tackle the entire country on one visit. What's the minimum amount of days that you would imagine coming from the U. S. Or Canada someplace around that area? What's the minimum amount of days that you would suggest?

Well my very first trip to Australia, I spent 13 months there and there are still bits of the country that I missed. So 13 months might be a little ambitious but who knows? Maybe not. So what I would suggest is the length of state really all depends. We see the U. S. Market tends to stay a little bit shorter, 2 to 3 weeks. If you can squeeze a little bit longer that's better the Canadian market. They usually start at three. They stretch it out maybe to about six weeks. So the longer you can stretch it out the more you can see.

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