Tourism New Zealand's Australia-based team are working to grab a
greater share of the growing Australian outbound market by
targeting the travel trade.
General Manager Tim Burgess told attendees at a recent market webinar how Tourism New Zealand's
partnership approach is critical to increasing New Zealand's market
share of Australian travellers.
"The Australian economy has performed well during the global
financial crisis and continues to do so. In the year to June 2011,
there were some 7.4 million departures from Australia.
"While New Zealand welcomed around 1.1 million of them, we face
strong competition from Bali and Hawaii in particular, as well as
the proliferation of competitors who entered the market in
2011.
"Our approach is to use a range of measures to work directly with
those who sell travel to New Zealand.
"We are developing a "kiwi specialist" education programme to
ensure we have experts across the base of some 30,000 Australian
travel agents. The activity includes on-line modules and a
graduated famil programme.
"This also acts as an incentive to travel sellers. In conjunction
with trade partners, we recently brought top frontline sellers to
New Zealand for a true Kiwi education.
"The event was themed New Zealand World Drive 2011. Agents had to
drive around the country following directions, answering questions
and gathering evidence of places visited all the while
participating in sightseeing activities and attractions. There was
a prize at the end for the team that correctly navigated their way
through the challenges and questions put before them.
"All our campaign work involves partners directly and delivers a
strong call to action that focuses on making it easy to make a
booking.
"One very important thing we're working on is communicating with
the trade in Australia about when our campaigns will be in market
and through what channels. So even if trade aren't partnering with
us they can leverage the work by TNZ to drive their own
sales.
"Another key part of our efforts is working alongside the trade to
ensure they regularly update and boost their listing on
newzealand.com with articles and deals. We find that once people
get that training, it's impossible to hold them back."
Next year will see the Tourism New Zealand trade team leading the
"NZ Inc" presence at consumer trade shows in Sydney, Melbourne,
Perth and Brisbane. Around 15-20 New Zealand businesses will be
represented to speak with a forecast 15-20,000 customers at each
show.
"We're already doing a lot of our marketing communications work in
partnership with trade in Australia and the plan is to grow this in
the year ahead," Tim concludes.