Putting CA skills to work in tourism
As two CAs in the tourism industry can attest, their accounting acumen is critical to navigating tough times and helping drive sustainable growth.
Quick take
- The tourism industry in Australia and New Zealand is bouncing back after the pandemic lockdowns, and revenues are almost back to pre-COVID levels.
- Haylee Preston CA in New Zealand and Jeff Ellison FCA in Australia both moved into the tourism sector full-time after working with tourism companies as accountants, and they both became chief executives.
- Preston and Ellison say their CA skills are invaluable in their executive roles, giving them ability to analyse performance, evaluate risk and allocate financial resources as part of a strategic business plan.
As in any industry, numbers are important and, after the pandemic, the tourism industry needed a reboot. Much of this was around understanding costs and the drivers of future performance. The good news is that the sector is rebounding across Australasia, with both economies open to international visitors and domestic residents free to holiday.
Stats NZ's annual tourism satellite account shows that for the year to March 2023, visitor spending was back up to NZ$37.7 billion, while in Australia the tourism GDP bounced back over 2023 to grow by 76.6%.
Two CAs, Haylee Preston CA and Jeff Ellison FCA have had front row seats since before COVID-19.
In New Zealand’s South Island, Preston worked her way up from a trainee accountant to partner. She was then lured across to a dedicated executive role with a tourism client, where she now manages a complex set of infrastructure assets.
In Adelaide, Ellison built a long and successful career in tourism after a stint at a practice, and ultimately drove the creation of an ASX-listed business in the SeaLink Travel Group, leading the company through a series of mergers and acquisitions.
In 2020, everything changed
Haylee Preston CA witnessed the “decimation” of the tourism industry during the pandemic so welcomes the growing number of visitors. “I was working from home, like everyone, and I was getting a call every 10 minutes from a different client, calling out for help,” she recalls.
“I built a list of those that needed to be called back with something to support them, then I’d spend all night trying to work through the list and try, and get it down before the calls started all over again.
“It was really tough just witnessing what was happening to people’s businesses.”
Today, Preston is the chief executive at Milford Sound Tourism, the infrastructure provider for tourism in the sound.
The organisation provides the harbour, wharves, parking and visitor terminal, in addition to the wastewater plan, and rubbish and recycling systems. Upgrading and growth is always on the agenda, but is balanced with the need for financial sustainability.
Before arriving in that role three years ago, Preston was a partner at accounting firm Findex in Te Anau. Most of her clients were in the tourism industry.
“There is also the understanding of numbers... I think that also gives stakeholders confidence that you are going to follow the rule book. Even though it’s not the CA rule book, you have respect for it and understand the value of compliance.”
Focusing on one client
“I think the reason I moved from public practice was the chance to be able to focus just on one client and give myself 100% to something, rather than dealing with so many different clients where you couldn’t give anywhere near as much,” she says.
“I think it was the ability to be able to focus and give it a good crack in trying to achieve some outcomes from working for the one entity.”
At Milford Sound Tourism, Preston has had to move beyond dealing with the numbers on a balance sheet and understand the world of asset management, which is going through a transformation in thinking driven by issues of sustainability and resilience.
New standards are also changing assessment management into a more rigorous discipline, and one where accountants and engineers are working together more closely than ever before to improve asset performance and return on investment.
“As we came out of the pandemic and the business was recovering, there were decisions to be made on the deferral of maintenance and capital projects,” says Preston. “We’ve also had to put on hold things such as measuring carbon footprints which are becoming so important to our industry. As our revenues improve, we are starting to do more in these areas, even though it’s also really difficult to recruit the skilled staff.”
For Preston, a big portion of her time is dedicated to stakeholder management. “To do something, there are about five different organisations to get permissions from and bits and pieces of information, and clearance before you can put your shovel in the ground,” she says. “So, this has been a very steep learning curve on the processes that you need to go through if you actually want to build something.
“These skills will be awesome if I decide to go back to public practice.”
While Preston credits her current role with expanding her liaison and prioritisation skills, she is grateful for having a solid foundation of accounting knowledge that prepared her well. “Of course, there is the understanding of numbers, but there is also the respect for standards and ethics.
“I think that also gives stakeholders confidence that you are going to follow the rule book. Even though it’s not the CA rule book, you have respect for it and understand the value of compliance.”
When Preston took up her role post-pandemic, Milford Sound Tourism had recorded its lowest visitor numbers in its 32 years of record keeping. For an organisation where the revenue model is on a per visitor basis, and where overheads are constant, this was an almost existential challenge.
“We still had to maintain staff, we still had to maintain assets and this was a real issue,” says Preston. “So, we started at the bottom again and the recovery is exciting. We just had our best July ever for passenger numbers and overall we are forecasting a recovery of around 85% of business pre-COVID.”
Technology, Preston says, has an increasing role as she manages the recovery.
“We have improved connectivity from remote locations, which are often tourist hotspots, as a result of government investments. This is enabling tourism operators to engage with customers in more mobile ways, enhancing experiences from the use of translation apps and multilingual audit guides, removing language barriers for our largely international market.”
Building a global business
Jeff Ellison FCA is now semiretired and has several board roles, as deputy chair at Tourism Australia and former chair of the public company Kelsian Group, which is the new name for the company he helped build over 30 years: SeaLink Travel.
Today, Kelsian is an ASX-listed company with a market capitalisation of A$1.4 billion, but when Ellison became involved it operated only one ferry route to Kangaroo Island, off the South Australian mainland.
That has grown to more than 100 vessels around Australia serving Western Australia, Bruny Island in Tasmania, the Tiwi Islands and Sydney Harbour. The company has also moved onto land and into the bus industry.
Like Preston, Ellison became involved in tourism through providing chartered accounting services to a client. He was working at a practice in Adelaide and SeaLink was a client. “It got to the stage where they were looking for more than just an external accountant. They wanted someone internally and I thought, commerce is a good way to go. I could see the potential of the business,” says Ellison. “I joined them in 1991 and I was there for 33 years, before retiring in July 2024.”
At SeaLink, Ellison was able to build a model of “putting tourists with transport”, including livestock. “Travelling on a boat full of cattle is quite an experience,” he says.
Once the company moved into merger and acquisition mode, it grew fast and, while he increasingly saw himself as an executive in the tourism industry, his “underlying accounting skills” were behind “every decision I ever made, because I knew how to analyse numbers and opportunities. We did over 24 acquisitions and I lost count after that,” Ellison says. “It was about doing the analysis, looking for the opportunities and then growing the market.”
While Ellison brought his skills with numbers to the SeaLink role, he says working in tourism also taught him the value of marketing, an area which is notoriously difficult to value accurately.
“You hear about it all the time... [to] cut the marketing spend. I think that is the biggest mistake. I firmly believe in its power to drive brands and attract business.”
“This is one of the trickiest areas and you hear about it all the time in businesses which are in trouble, they say they will cut the marketing spend,” he says. “I think that is actually the biggest mistake. Sure, you need to understand what you are getting from marketing, but certainly in tourism I firmly believe in its power to drive brands and attract business.”
At Tourism Australia, Ellison was at the organisation when it rolled out the successful global ‘Come and Say G’Day’ campaign, which he deemed was “enormously successful” in creating interest and demand in Australia. “We spent a lot of time measuring the impact of this marketing and the benefits of the dollars we spent, and I am firmly convinced on how effective it was,” he says. While he is moving into retirement, Ellison is also forward looking and is an enthusiastic advocate for the use of AI in the tourism sector. “You can already get an itinerary with AI. If, for example, you say ‘I want to go to Australia for seven nights and see Sydney Harbour and Kangaroo Island’ it can do that for you,” he says.
“What it doesn’t do yet is go to the next step of creating your bookings and being the travel agent for you, and I think that is an exciting possibility. I’d really encourage everyone to spend some of their time understanding the power of AI, because I think it has a really big role in the future of the industry.”
Photography at top by Wirestock