Meet your fun and passionate crew

Liz Ward CEO and Founder Tourism Tribe

Liz Ward

Founder & CEO

Liz is a committed advocate for innovation in marketing and distribution and recognised expert in strategy with more than 20 years experience specialising in travel and tourism.

Liz has pioneered many first-time digital transformation initiatives that have had lasting impacts including starting up the Australian Tourism Data Warehouse (ATDW) and being its CEO for over ten years.

Liz is the co-founder of the innovative tourism online learning community, Tourism Tribe, which launched in July 2015 and is already providing online coaching and support to over 1,600 tourism operators around Australia and the world.  Tourism Tribe was awarded in the Queensland Tourism Industry Innovation Awards in 2016 and in its inception in the UNWTO Innovation Awards in 2015. Liz is also is Managing Director of Digital Coaching International – a network of experts who assist businesses through digital transformation of their marketing and operational processes.  Liz is able to pull together a team of tourism experts with the relevant, specific experience to meet the clients’ needs. Recent consulting projects have included:
  • Development of an online health check and raking model to benchmark the digital maturity and effectiveness of destinations and tourism business
  • Implementation of a digital capability training program across 10 destinations in Queensland
  • Digital strategy and capability building program for 300 Northern Territory businesses TourismTribe.com/Digital-Leap
  • Development of the Digital Business Scorecard and Training Program for the Department of Digital Economy in Queensland business.qld.gov.au/running-business/it/digital-scorecard
Liz is an experienced speaker, facilitator and trainer and leads her sessions with a philosophy of shared knowledge and collaborative learning. Some of Liz’s speaking commitments have included:
  • Keynote at Destination Tweed AGM 2018
  • Keynote at the Welcome to the Dry conference in Darwin 2017
  • MC for the Australian Chamber of Commerce Mobile-ising Women in Business conference in 2016
  • Facilitated Digital Masterclass, Destination Queensland conference 2016
Liz is a Fellow of both the Australian Institute of Company Directors and Australian Institute of Management and holds an Advanced Diploma in Business from University of Southern Queensland. Liz has been a director on several boards, including Tourism and Events Queensland, Queenslanders Credit Union and presently is on the board of Women Chiefs of Enterprise, Australia. Liz is also President for Women Chiefs of Enterprise, Queensland.

Fabienne Wintle

Founder & CIO

Fabienne (Fabie) is a digital strategist who excels in her field of empowering tourism professionals to make the most of digital technology in their business ventures. 

She is an advocate for digital self-sufficiency within businesses and her hands-on approach has enabled thousands of small and large business owners with the tools and knowledge to make a living from Tourism.

Fabienne’s special blend of digital know-how, tourism knowledge, her training and coaching skills, ability to think outside the box and a natural gift for communication make her a sought after consultant, workshop facilitator and speaker in her field.

Tech skills

  • Web development: WordPress & WooCommerce (expert), Elementor Pro, Shopify, Wix and other CMSs, WPFusion
  • Email marketing: ActiveCampaign (expert), FunnelKit, MailChimp, Mailerlite
  • Google Workspace, Zapier, Automator

Fabienne has developed some of the best performing customer-facing websites and digital coaching programs in the tourism industry. She is also the co-founder of the worldwide digital phenomenon, Tourism Tribe, which has an online community of 1,500 businesses.

Recent projects have included:

  • Development of the Tourism Tribe genuine peer to peer online platform
  • Development of the Tourism and Events Queensland Social Media Criteria for the Best of Queensland project
  • Development of an online health check and raking model to benchmark the digital maturity and effectiveness of destinations and tourism business
  • Implementation of a digital capability training program across 10 destinations in Queensland
  • Digital strategy and capability building program for 300 Northern Territory businesses http://www.TourismTribe.com/Digital-Leap
  • Development of the Digital Business Scorecard and Training Program for the Department of Digital Economy in Queensland www.business.qld.gov.au/running-business/it/digital-scorecard

Fabienne holds a Bachelor and Masters in Information & Communication Systems (University of Geneva, Switzerland), a Masters in International Tourism & Hospitality Management (Griffith University, Australia), a Certificate IV in Training & Assessment and a Certificate IV in Small Business Management. She was also awarded Young Achiever of the Year – Queensland Tourism (2010) and received the Griffith University Business School Young Outstanding Alumnus Award (2011).

Fabienne has been a director on several boards, including Queensland Tourism Industry Council and is currently Vice President of Discovery Coast Tourism and Commerce. Fabie is also a Queensland Digital Champion (Queensland government).

Fabie practices what she preaches, living a balanced connected lifestyle in the beachside community of Agnes Water/1770 (Central Queensland), with her head in the digital world and both feet firmly planted on the sandy ground.

Claire McCollum

Senior coach and digital advisor

Claire is Tourism Tribe’s Coach and Digital Strategist. She has extensive experience in the tourism industry working for tour and accommodation operators in guiding and marketing roles and now provides confidence and capability building to tourism operators through training and coaching.

A major part of Claire’s role is to work with clients to develop content marketing strategies, blog updates and social media plans.

Claire worked as a tour guide both in Kakadu (8 day tours) and in the Kimberleys for two years. She has also previously worked for 8 years as the marketing and business manager for a regional holiday letting business where she transformed that business to a fully self-sufficient, online tourism offering. Claire migrated the entire operational systems and marketing to digital and cloud-based platforms, driving efficiencies and sales and making the business systems available remotely at any time.

Claire is very well-travelled, both overseas and in Australia and has lived in every state except for South Australia and Tasmania!

Julia Retson

Digital Solutions Manager

Julia works on the technical side of Tourism Tribe, building the website and our automated marketing system to ensure that customers have a seamless user experience while enjoying what we have to offer.

With her previous experience working in visual effects on major feature films, Julia is no stranger to complicated digital tools and has had many an opportunity to hone her skills in explaining how to use these tools in simple and easily understood English. Julia's also has extensive experience with online learning platforms as she has been both a creator of content, while using progressive teaching methods as a high school teacher, and as a user while completing her online diploma.

Julia has a degree in Aerospace Engineering as well as a graduate diploma in Secondary Education (Mathematics & Physics) and a diploma of Graphic Design.

Originally from Canada, she has travelled extensively throughout Australia, New Zealand, and many other places around the world. She has just recently returned from a year travelling Australia in a caravan with her young family.

Sam ward headshot

Sam Ward

Business Coach

Sam is part of the Tourism Tribe coaching crew. He is passionate about developing and growing products and processes – start-ups and small businesses.

Through his mentoring approach he elicits business creativity using lean canvas processes to flesh out the economic value of a goal and helping others thrive through coaching and achieving milestones.

Mandy Murray

Business Coach

In her life before joining the Tourism Tribe team, Mandy built her career as an accomplished Organisational and Leadership Development consultant in the technology sector. Customers are at the core of Mandy's coaching philosophy - she knows that acquiring and maintaining loyal customers is key to the success of businesses at any size or stage in their development. Having spearheaded a successful skincare brand, Mandy has firsthand experience of building a brands digital presence from the ground up and knows what it takes to get your business and product seen by your target customer. Mandy's passion for supporting people, building community and unleashing their business potential is entirely contagious - she leaves coaching clients feeling empowered and inspired.

Clem Lallement

Clem Lallement

Business Coach

Clem is passionate about helping businesses grow and evolve in today’s digital world. She loves to see people and businesses succeed and enjoy the journey! Over the last 10 years, she has supported businesses locally and internationally, helping them to make the most of the digital tools available to them to boost productivity and profitability. Her optimism and motivation are contagious and you’ll end the coaching session with a smile!

Kerrin Wallace

Business Coach

Kerrin is the founder of Left Bank Design, a Melbourne-based design studio specialising in web design and digital marketing. She has over 25 years of marketing experience in Australia and the UK, working for world-famous brands such as Sony Music & Estee Lauder. Kerrin has spent the last decade helping a wide range of Australian businesses (from tourism to retail) reach their full potential by creating and implementing marketing strategies that ignite real business results.

Our team in action

Tourism Tribe is a genuine peer to peer community of tourism operators, industry and digital experts in a supported learning environment.

Tourism Tribe is relentlessly committed to helping tourism businesses stay up-to-date with transformative technology and business opportunities brought by the new traveller. We aim to help businesses to leverage these new opportunities in the most time and cost-effective manner.

The Tourism Tribe platform is built leveraging interconnected free cloud platforms available to anyone, from anywhere, to deliver cost-effective training and the ability for any business, independently of their location, to share best practices without reinventing the wheel.

Back in July 2021, we celebrated our sixth year anniversary with a six-month recap of coaching sessions, events, industry workshops, news updates and more!

We are so thankful to everyone who has been part of this journey and all the amazing businesses we have met and had the pleasure of working alongside these past six years.  We hope to celebrate another six years helping small tourism businesses navigate the digital world.

Shopping Cart
0