084 | Bridging the Gap: Tourism, Agriculture, and Community

About this episode

This episode explores the intersection of tourism and agriculture, highlighting the challenges and opportunities in rural Australia.

What happens when two industries that need each other still haven't quite figured out how to work together? In this episode, Despina Karatzias is on location at the 2025 ART Conference, sitting down with Yvette from Destination Riverina Murray for a conversation that covers the ground-level reality of agritourism, social impact, and the visitor economy in rural and regional Australia. Yvette brings nearly two decades of on-the-ground experience managing tourism across 22 local governments, and she doesn't hold back on where the gaps still are. The conversation moves across the social impact shift that defined this year's conference programme, the very real role agritourism plays in keeping rural communities financially viable during drought, and what a 10,000-kilometre road trip with a six-year-old taught Yvette about the visitor experience that no dashboard can show you. There is also a genuinely useful conversation about data — how banking data is helping smaller LGAs tell their visitor economy story for the first time, and where that intersects with AI's growing role in making sense of it all. If you work in regional tourism, destination management, or agritourism, or you're…

People in this episode

Host: Despina Karatzias

Guest: Yvette

Topics covered

• agritourism
• community impact
• visitor economy
• rural tourism
• data in tourism

Keywords

• agritourism
• visitor economy
• rural communities
• social impact
• data analytics

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Destination Riverina Murray

Places: Australia

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