TOURISM PROFILE: One-on-one with Tourism Tasmania board nominee Clint Walker

From dropping out of university and having to close down his first business to becoming a successful tourism operator and industry leader - Clint Walker has learned a lot during his career.

His early stumbles have helped shape him and rather than be embarrassed about them, he’s happy to share his story in a bid to help shape the future success of Tasmania’s tourism industry. Clint is the Tourism Industry Council Tasmania’s recent nomination to the State Government for a vacant position on Tourism Tasmania’s board. A decision is expected in September and if the nomination is accepted, Clint will become the first person from the North West to serve in the role.

“I am absolutely thrilled with the nomination, which I see as a massive compliment from the TICT directors who see fit to nominate me to represent the TICT and in turn Tasmania’s tourism industry to that position on the board. It is something I have aspired to for many years,” Clint says.

The Circular Head native has been an owner and operator within the tourism industry for 23 years and on the board of the TICT for 11 years.

Together with his parents, Geoff and Rosemaree Walker, Clint and wife Katinka bought the leasehold of the Stanley Seaview Inn - at the time a 24-room three-and-a-half star motel that had suffered from a lack of investment.

Two years into the lease they bought the freehold and over the past 20 years they have improved their offering to include luxury accommodation, with Horizon Deluxe Apartments built in 2007.

Another 4 new villas are proposed to be built in the near future.

In a bid to reduce the risk associated with the seasonal nature of tourism in coastal towns, Clint and Katinka diversified to develop Burnie City Apartments, which is now a six-apartment operation aimed at corporate clientele. As the current President of his Local Tourism Association, Circular Head Tourism, and the founding Vice President of his regional tourism organisation, West by North West, Clint has an enviable CV. But he doesn’t sugar coat his journey. During his early days at university he spent too much time establishing a social club focussing on beer and bands rather than the equations and economics of the accounting degree in which he was enrolled.

Clint Walker with wife Katinka and children Rakelle, 18 and Jarrah, 16 at Wineglass Bay

“As a consequence I dropped out of uni without an accounting degree, but I did meet the love of my life Katinka there in our second year while she was studying social work,” he muses.

Together the pair travelled the world working in a number of tourism and hospitality roles. It was during a stint managing a backpacker lodge that offered eco-tours in Durbin, South Africa, that their fates were sealed. “We came back six months earlier than we had planned with the idea of replicating the business in Tasmania and in 1997, while we couldn’t find a suitable place to set up a backpackers, we started Devils Playground Eco Tours,” he recalls.

“We started with an eight-seater in the first year and then upgraded to a 14-seater offering day tours out of Launceston and then we replicated the operation out of Hobart.

“After three years we relocated to Stanley to take up the leasehold and management of what is now known as Stanley Seaview Inn. That business required Katinka and I to put in 90-hours a week because it had been run into the ground. It meant I wasn’t able to efficiently manage the tour business and we started to lose money and when it became unprofitable we had to close the doors and liquidate the business and realise a $35,000 loss.

“I am happy to tell people that because that’s the risk of being an entrepreneur - you are probably not trying hard enough if you haven’t lost any money over the journey.”

While the tour business may have stalled, his drive to achieve certainly didn’t. “About five or six years ago I was feeling stale and wanted to improve myself, stimulate my brain and make myself more employable to bigger, broader tourism organisations and boards, so I completed my MBA at UTas over three years,” Clint says. “It was extremely difficult to take on the workload but I wanted to learn as much as I could and I achieved satisfyingly high results in contrast to my first foray into uni! The Tourism Tasmania Board nomination is reward for the hard work and he is keen to put into practice everything he has learned on the journey. “Tourism Tasmania is an absolutely crucial and pivotal aspect of our tourism industry that performs the single most important task of generating demand for our destination,” Clint explains. “If we don’t have an effective state tourism office we will only have a fraction of the tourists come here and therefor the industry will be a fraction of itself.

“I want to contribute to the development of our strategic path forward to achieve our goal of increasing tourist numbers and maximising customer spend. “My biggest goal is to address seasonality with real regional dispersal because the winter season in Tasmania is the real handbrake on our development and prosperity and that impacts on profitability and workforce.”