London, Sept 8 (ANI): A senior Gold Coast tourism leader has warned that a racist element exists on the Glitter Strip that needs to be urgently addressed to ensure that Chinese visitors feel at home in Queensland.
Paul Donovan, who heads Gold Coast Airport and is also chairman of Gold Coast Tourism, said locals "still need to overcome some of the feeling about having a lot of Asians in our city", the Courier Mail reports.
"I believe that as a tourist city, we need to move past that significantly and quickly," he said today at the launch of a new 20-year master plan for Gold Coast Airport.
Although he did not call Coast locals racist, he insisted "there is still an element of people that don't understand the importance of tourism from Asia to this region".
"What we need to do is realise that the development that takes places for tourists flows on to all the local residents," he added.
Donovan said about 57 million Chinese currently travelled abroad and that the Gold Coast was only receiving about 116,000 a year, so the potential was huge, the paper added. (ANI)
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