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General Climbing Discussion

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Learn To Lead 7-Sep-2008 At 10:39:29 PM stuart h

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In answer to Pat’s question as to whether commercial operators had to pay to operate on public land (and not making any comments on the value of this program).

In so far as I understand it, to operate on public land such as National Parks commercial organisations such as a company or individual guides, are required to be licensed by or hold a concession from the land managers (typically Parks Vic/DSE here and DOC in NZ).

Getting these licenses generally requires an application and/or processing fee up front and then payment of a set fee for each participant day. While they add to the overheads in what is generally a fairly low margin industry, these costs are probably not especially onerous.

Probably the larger cost arises from the Parks Vic requirement that the operator hold a $10M public liability insurance policy on which PV are named as an interested party as a pre-requisite for the issuing of a license to operate.

Insurance works out to be very expensive in terms of % of turnover as most are fairly small operations in a niche industry and therefore don’t enjoy benefits of scale individually or across the industry, in contrast to other professions. Negotiating a collective insurance and access concession, such as that organised by the Association of Canadian Mountain Guides, would probably be a good goal for the ACIA if they wanted to grow the guiding and instruction industry in Australia.