Outdoor education businesses are questioning their viability as merciless price hikes at the bowser force them to absorb significant price increases to continue providing camp services to hundreds of thousands of school children.
The peak body for Australian outdoor education today issued an open letter to policymakers following growing concerns from struggling service providers.
"Schools are cancelling camps due to increased transport costs," Outdoor Council of Australia chair Lori Modde said.
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"Regional adventure tourism operators are seeing visitors postpone or cancel trips, booking hesitation and reduced travel confidence."
Outdoors Victoria chief executive Andrew Knight said suppliers have placed five to 25 per cent surcharges on bus transport and other services required by the sector.
"Other suppliers have already said that there is going to be further surcharges on delivery of other things, like gas for showers or other food items and everything else, that get delivered on trucks to the school camps," Knight said.
"We're talking about hundreds of school children at each school camp, so that's a whole lot of food every week that needs to get to regional and rural locations."
Hall's Outdoor Education Managing Director Anthony Hall said his fuel bill has skyrocketed from $3000 to $4000 a week to $10,000.
What's worse, he and many other outdoor education providers have no choice but to absorb the costs themselves.
"All of these contracts are pre-set 12 months in advance, so we can't go back to our clients and go 'hey, we need more money'," Hall said.
"At this moment we're absorbing all of that in the hope that the fuel crisis is not going to last too long.
"We're operating on minimum margins anyway, so at this moment we're just waiting, hoping that the prices are going down so that we can actually not go under."
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Bindaree Outdoor Education chief executive Gemima Weiler said her business has not lost any clients to the fuel crisis yet, but said she and other outdoor education service providers were trapped in a pricey catch-22.
"It's very, very difficult to pass on this kind of huge increase of a third-party provider to a school with a set cost," Weiler said.
"They would've been budgeting for that eight months, nine months in advance and if we all of a sudden pass on another $2000, $3000, $4000 to them, the school is out of pocket.
"But the problem is if we don't run those camps, we're losing hundreds of thousands of dollars.
"So it's like, do we take that $2000, $3000 hit and not pass it on to our clients because of affordability and timeliness and everything else? But then, where's the business left if we have to withhold, not only the backend business cost of fuel rising, but also our upfront client costs of getting providers to actually get these kids out there."
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Weiler fears the impact on children could be "huge" if school camps are cancelled due to unmanageable price hikes.
"[Camps] teach resilience, they stretch the comfort zones and make them confident in themselves and work on team-building and community and all those things you need to be strong, healthy individuals as well as just physically being out in nature, and good mental health," she said.
"The more these fuel prices go up, then the first people to drop off will be the kids, potentially, who need it the most, which are the lower socio-economic schools or public schools.
"If we have to stop programming again in Victoria [after COVID], there's just hundreds and thousands of more kids that will miss out on the camp experience and it won't be picked up at a later date."
The sector is pleading with state, territory and federal governments to prioritise the outdoor education industry in their policy-making.
"If governments, whether state or federal, decide that they need to ration fuel, we urge those governments to be able to make sure that school students aren't stranded on camp, or not able to go on camp because their school buses haven't got the fuel they need to get them there," Knight said.
"That's probably our biggest call to state, territory and federal governments is that we're on the list with those that need to operate for our community and for our society to function."
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