The Sustainable Tourism Cooperative Research Centre (STCRC) is the world’s leading scientific institution managing and delivering research to support the sustainability of travel and tourism.  UTS is one of the STCRC's University Partners.   STCRC projects are developed in collaboration with Industry Partner Oganisations which are then advertised for an external competitive application amongst researchers from the University Partners.  UTS is currently involved in the following projects:

• Systematic and Strategic Collection and Use of Visitor Information in Protected Area Management

• Urban Tourism Research Program

• STCRC Cultural Heritage

• STCRC  Visitor Accessibility in Urban Centres - with Easy Access Australia

• STCRC Developing a Business Case for Accessible Tourism

• Tourist Experiences of people who are Blind or have a Vision Impairment

This project aims to identify core generic visitor data needs amongst Australian protected area agencies, to evaluate current practices in relation to meeting those needs, and to develop ways to improve on the current practices for collecting, managing and use of such data. The project will seek to develop nationally consistent approaches and to encourage sharing of information between parks agencies where this would improve the quality and quantity of data available for informing management decision making processes. Having a better understanding of visitors as an outcome of this study should enable more efficient and effective management decisions to be made in relation to meeting their needs and expectations, as well as dealing with issues associated with visitation to parks. The project will be conducted in close consultation with protected area agencies so that it reflects not only their data needs but also recognizes the pragmatic organisational cultural issues associated with visitor data collection, management and use. Researchers from University of Technology, Sydney, Murdoch University and University of South Australia will be involved in the project.  Project coming out of Setting a Research Agenda for Accessible Tourism.

The project involves an examination of tourist expectations for visiting urban destinations, an identification of factors that, for the visitor, determine a quality experience and an exploration of the places and times tourists visit, and the services that visitors utilise. Visitor tracking with mobile GPS devices is employed to identify patterns of behaviour, movement, and the range of urban services that visitors use within urban destinations. The project also seeks to identify key differences between groups of people who visit urban destinations. This project will inform and guide the future governance and improved functioning of urban tourism destinations. The project is funded by the Sustainable Tourism Cooperative Research Centre, Tourism New south Wales, Australian Capital Tourism. The project is aligned to the Urban Tourism Research Agenda and is led by a team from the University of Technology Sydney and the University of Canberra.  Project coming out of Setting a Research Agenda for Accessible Tourism.

The research project conducted fieldwork in a number of case studies in metropolitan and regional and rural areas of New South Wales and Victoria in order to investigate and explore the intersection between traditional and new cultural landscape precincts and the current and future patterns of Australian tourism. This project compares the more ‘traditional’ cultural tourist precinct of Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales and Woolloomooloo Finger Wharf with the cosmopolitan cultural diversity of ethnic precincts including Sydney’s and Melbourne’s Chinatown and Melbourne’s Little Italy, Lygon Street. In addition to these urban tourist precincts, the research project also aimed to investigate the potential of rural tourist precincts in the form of Griffith, New South Wales ­ which has recently branded itself ‘Cosmopolitan Country’ to emphasise its Italian and multicultural past and present. Through tracing the history of cultural diversity in each of the tourist precincts and through fieldwork involving visitor surveys (100 in each site) and key informant interviews in each site, we have explored current tourist dynamics in each case study precinct as cultural landscapes of tourism, including issues related to interpretation. These case studies provide important examples of how, in a range of urban and rural areas, cultural heritage and contemporary cultural landscapes can be developed into effective tourist attractions.  Project coming out of Setting a Research Agenda for Accessible Tourism.

Understanding the broader issues of visitor accessibility is paramount to positive visitor experiences and the tourism industry realising economic and social benefits.  However, assisting people to move within and between urban environments carries its own set of challenges that must be understood before access can be effectively planned and managed.  Visitor accessibility is concerned with all tourism markets including seniors and people with disabilities who have been defined through accessible tourism.  Access issues recognise that there are a series of structural barriers that may constrain their desired or expected experiences in urban centres.  With this in mind, the aim of the Umbrella Project is to evaluate and assess urban tourism environments, including urban national parks, through the lens of universal design principles.  This project incorporates all sectors of the tourism industry.  Project coming out of Setting a Research Agenda for Accessible Tourism.

This project seeks to develop business based case studies for accessible tourism in Australia. Most market arguments for accessible tourism relate to the demand side potential that people with disabilities and seniors may contribute towards the economy. These market potential arguments are based on extrapolations from secondary data sources for disability and tourism. No published research has focused on supply side arguments of profitable tourism businesses and other social and environmental outcomes of accessible tourism. In Australia, some work has been done to document best-practice cases of accessible tourism providers (Office of National Tourism, 1998). However, this work stopped short at identifying the businesses without providing a detailed understanding of why they were successful businesses and the benefits obtained by creating accessible endeavours. As identified in Darcy (2005), developing a business case for accessible tourism was prioritised as an area of future research because of the misconceptions many operators have about accessible tourism and the documented cases of discrimination in a tourism context (HREOC 2006).  Project coming out of Setting a Research Agenda for Accessible Tourism.

This research proposal seeks to document the experience of tourists with vision impairment. The proposed geographic regions are NSW and WA due to previous relationships that the chief investigators have with the population communities. The study will be inductive in approach and encompass two phases. The first will use qualitative methods (1 focus groups and 6 in-depth interviews in each state) to collect the experience of toursist with a vision impairment. The tourist experiences will be analysed through appropriate theoretical frameworks which take account of multiple tourist voices and how this needs to be incorporated into management practices. Based on the findings of phase 1, phase 2 will be to develop industry outcomes that may include for example fact sheets. This would provide the tourism sector with ready access to information needed to provide best practice service provision. The outcome of this research will be to provide a template/framework of considerations for including the vision-impaired experience within private sector, not-for-profit and government tourism endeavours and to provide these to the sector in easy to read fact sheets. It is recognized that this is a scoping project that will be completed in a very short time frame and it should be considered a starting point for future research in this area.  Project coming out of Setting a Research Agenda for Accessible Tourism.

(While not a STCRC project this project is linked to the other projects as accomodation is a foundation of destination visitation.)  The combined effects of the proportion of people with disability and the ageing of the population have significant implications for global tourism. A foundation of any tourism experience is locating appropriate accommodation. A number of studies have shown that Easy Access Markets identified serious issues with the way that accommodation information is documented, promoted and marketed by the accommodation sector. Further, the accommodation sector’s understanding of access differs significantly from that of people with disabilities and they have reported that the nondisabled view this type of accommodation as substandard. This research seeks to understand the 'discourse of access’ between the demand and supply of accessible accommodation as a foundation for developing a business case for this class of accommodation as a means to improve occupancy rates.  Project coming out of Setting a Research Agenda for Accessible Tourism.