Case Study: Tourism New Zealand website
Home to roughly four million people and a long-haul flight from every one of the world's principal tourist-generating markets, New Zealand is a small nation for which drawing in overseas visitors has never been straightforward. Tourism today supplies about nine percent of national output and earns more from abroad than any other industry. It runs in the opposite direction to the country's other export trades: where those make goods to sell overseas, tourism carries its customers into New Zealand. What is on offer is the place itself – its scenery, its inhabitants and the things a traveller can do there. The campaign Tourism New Zealand launched in 1999 to project a fresh brand identity abroad rested on three ideas: breathtaking landscapes, exhilarating outdoor pursuits and a living Maori heritage. It lifted New Zealand into the ranks of the most powerful national brands anywhere.
Anchoring that campaign was a website, www.newzealand.com, intended to act as a single doorway to everything a would-be visitor might be after. At its core sat a directory of tourism operators, taking in firms based within New Zealand as well as overseas agencies that sold trips to it. Getting onto the list demanded very little: a business had only to complete a short form, so that even the tiniest guesthouse or the most specialised activity provider could win a web presence and reach an audience on the far side of the world. And because every operator could log in and amend its own entry whenever it chose, what visitors saw stayed dependable and current. Quality, meanwhile, was safeguarded through a separate arrangement: each organisation displayed on the site was independently judged against an agreed set of national standards, and one strand of that assessment weighed the mark a business left on the natural world.
The site carried features on well-known people and places too, so as to convey something of what a New Zealand trip actually felt like. Among the best liked was a recorded interview with a retired national rugby coach; another that pulled in heavy traffic was an interactive tour of the locations that overseas film-makers had picked out for their productions. Tools for independent travellers wanting to shape trips of their own were added as the site matured. Planning a driving holiday was made simpler by a catalogue of the country's best-loved road journeys, which put forward different ones depending on the terrain a motorist favoured and set out the distances and times each involved.
A Travel Planner tool came along afterwards. It let users click to 'bookmark' whichever places or attractions caught their eye, then see the lot laid out on a map. For any cluster of chosen spots, the planner proposed possible routes and spelt out the public-transport links running between them, together with connections to somewhere to stay close by. By registering, a user could keep a Travel Plan to return to later, or print it off to carry along on the trip. The site also ran a 'Your Words' area, where anybody who wished was free to send in an account of their New Zealand journey for possible publication on its pages.
For its online achievement and innovation the Tourism New Zealand website collected two awards, though the more revealing yardstick was arguably the jump in visitor numbers. Across the years from 1999 to 2004, total spending by tourists rose by an average approaching seven percent annually. Arrivals from Britain climbed faster again, at something like thirteen percent a year between 2002 and 2006, while British travel abroad taken as a whole grew by a mere four percent over that stretch.
The site was designed so that individuals and travel companies alike could assemble itineraries and packages to fit their own tastes. Crucially, it let visitors hunt for things to do not only by where they were, but by the specific character of the activity – a telling point, since studies show activities matter more than anything to how content a visitor feels, supplying seventy-four percent of that satisfaction, while transport and accommodation make up the remaining twenty-six percent. As a rule, the more activities a visitor takes on, the more contented they become. Travellers also get the most out of cultural activities when these are hands-on – dropping in at a marae, say, to discover how Maori life was traditionally led. Many long-haul travellers prize this kind of learning, taking away tales for friends and family back home. Those coming to New Zealand also seem reluctant to feel like one of a crowd, treating activities shared with only a few others as more meaningful.
New Zealand, one might argue, is hardly a run-of-the-mill destination. Small in size, its visitor economy leans for the most part on small businesses, and the country is widely taken to be a safe, English-speaking place served by a reliable transport network. Given the length of the flight, the majority of visitors linger a while – about twenty days on average – and aim to see as much of the country as they can on what usually feels like a once-in-a-lifetime trip. Yet the deeper lessons carry across anywhere: the worth of a strong brand, of a strategy built on experiences available nowhere else, and of a thorough, easy-to-use website.
