Sunshine Coast adventure tourism company Chimu Adventures has celebrated being presented with the Most Outstanding Tour Operator gong at the prestigious AFTA National Travel Industry Awards.
The company, which has offices in Mooloolaba and Sydney, was named one of only five finalists in the prestigious award but was named outright winners at a gala event on Saturday night.
“It’s impossible to put into words what this means to us,” the company’s marketing Marketing Manager Meg Hall said after the win.
“We were up against heavyweight competition, so the significance is not lost on us – being a finalist among this crowd was an honour, to win the award feels like an out of body experience.”
“We’re all wearing grins we cannot wipe from our faces, and I suspect they’ll be there for a very long time.”
The company, which prior to the COVID pandemic organised tours to Latin America and Antarctica, has endured a tumultuous few years due to border closures, which shut down the business virtually overnight.
Ms Hall previously revealed that the award nomination was an emotional achievement in itself, given the difficulties in keeping the business afloat.
The sudden border lockdowns saw many of their clients stranded abroad, requiring all staff to scramble to get them safety home, which required chartering of planes as well as negotiating with foreign governments and militaries to allow the planes to actually take off and fly back to Australia.
To learn more about the repatriation of Chimu Adventures’ stranded clients, watch this video:
“First of all, we brought our clients home and then we had to work out how we can operate because we couldn’t take people in cruises to Antarctica anymore, which was our bread and butter, or take people on trips to Latin America – there was no travel actually happening,” Ms Hall explained.
“We said, ‘We’re not going to sit here and lie down and die’ … so we tried to find another way that still really fitted with our brand.”
To prevent their closure, Chimu Adventures introduced new scenic flights to Antarctica, for travellers to see the mysterious Aurora Australis – also known as the Southern Lights.
The idea was ingenious – the trips departed and arrived in Australia, so were technically classed as domestic flights.
“We came up with these amazing scenic flights that we’ve been operating, which kept us not just in hibernation but actually functioning as tour operators for the last couple of years,” Ms Hall said.
“Very few people in the world have seen the Aurora Australis … to actually go down and see them from underneath, outside the windows of a Dreamliner, was something that certainly commercial travellers had never done before.”
With borders re-opening, the original tours have returned, but the scenic flights have been added to their staple tour offerings.
Ms Hall acknowledged the difficulties endured by all travel companies due to the COVID pandemic.
“There’s a lot of people in the travel industry who deserve awards – it’s been one of those forgotten industries,” she said.
“The forgotten frontline travel agents who spent some of the toughest times in their lives on the telephone, taking calls from families who were trying to get their children home, people who were stuck overseas, terrified.
“It was like working in a disaster centre, and none of our industry were trained for that, they were trained for making dreams come true.”
For Chimu Adventures, the tourism award win is a reward for the efforts of staff through tough times, but they won’t be slowing down.
“Now, it’s back to work,” Ms Hall said with a big smile.
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To learn more, read our previous story: Desperate years: ingenious survival measures reap massive reward for Coast tour company
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