Smartraveller’s Travel Smart booklet (DFAT)

Updating this iconic international travel resource for a changed world

The client

Smartraveller is the Australian Government’s travel advice and consular information service. Run by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), it offers consular services for Australians travelling or living overseas by publishing specific travel advice for 178 destinations globally. Smartraveller issues ‘do not travel’ warnings, providing general travel advice and offering consular emergency support and crisis response for Aussies needing help overseas. The team also prepares useful brochures on different travel matters, including the Travel Smart booklet.

The problem

The DFAT Smartraveller Travel Smart booklet is well known to the almost 60 per cent of Australians who hold a passport. A compilation of essential tips and contacts for travellers, it’s given to all Australian citizens when they either renew their Australian passport or receive one for the first time. Though the booklet has been an integral part of passport packs for decades, it hadn’t been updated to reflect the massive changes to international travel brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. And with Aussies set to embrace international travel again after years of closed borders, the booklet needed an overhaul.

The solution

Catch the Sun worked closely with the Smartraveller team across the entire editorial process to update the booklet. We wrote a new section of advice relating to COVID-19, copy edited all content, and provided two rounds of proofreading to ensure every letter and digit in this iconic booklet was just as it should be. One of those proofreading rounds was signing-off on the Printer’s Proof before the printing company sent the booklet to print on the printing press.

The results

The updated 56-page booklet is now issued in all new passport packs, with the Smartraveller team very happy with the result. In the 2019–20 year, Australia issued 1,745,340 passports – both new ones and renewals, and we can only imagine how this number will increase following more than two years of pandemic-related disruption. That’s an extraordinarily high number of printed copies and a lot of eyes on our work! We are really thrilled with how it turned out. 

Our work