This is what we see as the drawcard to get more opportunities for more civil yachts to come into the country. This is the Ben Taylor Podcast, the home of Marine Industry Insights. Enjoy. Hi everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Ben Taylor Podcast, the home of Marine Industry Insights. This is part of a little series where we try and understand the Australian yachting industry as best as we can. And we're actually going to hear about a South Pacific island, something that's very closely connected to yachting in Australia, which is Vanuatu. So I'm here with Adela, nice to see you Adela. Nice to meet you Ben. So tell me a little bit more, what happens in Vanuatu in terms of the yachting scene, and what's kind of the scenario today? Well, Vanuatu pretty much is a tourism destination in the Pacific. Tourism is pretty much the lifeblood of our economy. We do have a lot of aviation tourists that do come around the country, but one thing we've noted recently is, yachting tourism plays a big role also. In the last three years, COVID, we took some time to sit down, re-look at where the framework and structures of tourism and everything. And so our government undertook an economic impact assessment in the yachting sector, and identified that pretty much yachting was a critical part of economic recovery. And so in the last two years, we've now started doing a lot of networking with other yachties coming into the country. We've identified Australia as one of the primary markets for yachting. We've also identified that secondary to that would be yachties coming off from the Panama Canal, moving into French Polynesia, Tonga, Fiji, and eventually would come to Vanuatu. And so we needed to start doing some networking, promoting Vanuatu as the destination for yachties. And so that's why we're here. That's where you get involved. And so why is yachting perhaps more favourable or as favourable as other types of tourism? What's so good about it? That's a very important question. For Vanuatu, it is about the length of stay that the yachties are staying in the country. In terms of the visas that we provide to yachties, they could stay up to three to six months. But Vanuatu is a country of 83 islands. We have six provinces. We have the world's most live accessible volcano in the island of Tana. And so we find a lot of yachties come to Vanuatu because it's in their bucket list to visit the volcano. You get to have an experience of sleeping at the Treetop Lodge, which is a tree house on top of a big bunion tree, a big tree. You're also able to do blue gave, snorkeling, blue holes, and pretty much. Yeah, so you can see it as a destination. You see all these unique experiences and all this kind of thing that are in pretty high demand today. And what does this become? So what kind of facilities are there? How does the yacht act around Vanuatu? Is it just an anchorage? Are there marinas available? What kind of infrastructure is there? How does that all work? So we only have anchorage at this point in time. There's one or two marina facilities, but they're private and they're small. We do have about one or two that can cater for the super yachts. And this is something that we've identified that we need to do more marina facility development in the country. The government has identified that we're going to have a major marina facility developed in the next two to three years. And so we're excited that the industry and the investment behind it is quite exciting. This is what we see as the drawcard to get more opportunities for more super yachts to come into the country. This is so good, because I don't think I've ever heard of Vanuatu in the context of what the yachting industry talks about. We talk about the Mediterranean all the time, the Caribbean all the time, Florida. Exactly. And ever so often about Australia, but certainly not Vanuatu. So it's great to see you get on the map, you get involved in the industry. Exactly. You want to be part of it, supporting conferences and being here to meet the right people. That's great to see. Thank you. Thank you very much, Ben. You're very welcome. For providing the opportunity for Vanuatu tourism. Yeah, no problem at all. Thank you very much for your insights. Thank you. Everybody, if that's insightful and useful to you, make sure you're following here to see plenty more content just like this. All being well, we'll see you very soon. Bye for now. Thank you for listening to another episode of the Ben Taylor podcast, the home of Marine Industry Insights. We'll see you again very soon. Bye for now.