Tourism Industry Blog

“What’s the difference between Tourism NZ, Ministry of Tourism, Maori Tourism Council – RTO’s, MRTO’s – overkill?” Good question! What are all their different functions and is it overkill or just confusing?

You been approached by a media outlet and they love what you do, they’ve heard great things about your business….Naturally you’re thrilled that someone is interested in publicity about you and your business but there’s a catch…

Despite large numbers of international wine lovers visiting wineries in NZ, regionally differentiated wine tourism has not been fully developed in our destination marketing and product development portfolio mix to-date.

This term is being used more and more as the awareness of the planet to all things environmental increases. Terms like sustainable tourism and nature based tourism can confuse things but ecotourism attempts to include a number of aspects.

It is no surprise that automated monitoring of traveller reviews is in its infancy while the phenomenon of consumer reliance on user generated content is well established.

Interpersonal influence and word of mouth (WOM) are ranked the most important information source when a consumer is making a purchase decision and the influence may be especially important in the tourism and hospitality industry.

Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, blogs, wikis, forums and your own customer communities – people are sharing more content than ever online. There’s no bigger source of honest, direct and outspoken opinion and community assistance than social media sites.

I’m interested to hear from New Zealand tourism operators as to what tourism websites bring them the most traffic and booking enquiries and why. Is there a website that you would absolutely always maintain a listing on (free or not)?

There are conversations going on everywhere, all the time by your customers. A lot of the time you will never know about these conversations….well not quite, fortunately there’s now a growing number of these conversations happening online.

The main objective of the E Tourism Conference is to create awareness, educate and update the travel industry with the latest e-travel strategies. This will enable tourism providers to achieve maximum return on their advertising investment and teach them how to do this effectively in the minimum time necessary.