Visitor Experience Monitor 2010/11

Tourism New Zealand's annual Visitor Experience Monitor (VEM) is a survey of 4,500 international tourists who came to New Zealand for a holiday or to visit friends and family.

The VEM asks how satisfied international visitors are with different aspects of their New Zealand holiday, and is used to assess behavioral patterns pre, post and during travel within New Zealand. For further information on the methodology of the VEM please visit here.

Conducted annually, the research provides a benchmark for the New Zealand tourism industry from which to improve the experiences it offers visitors.

The research surveys visitors from nine key markets - Australia, the UK, US, Japan, South Korea, China, Germany, South East Asia and the Youth market - about their holiday experiences and whether their trip to New Zealand met their expectations.

The visitor experience is broken down into seven areas: accommodation; food and beverage; internal transport; activities; i-SITE visitor centres; environment; and safety.

Statistical modeling is used to identify which of these aspects are most important to visitors in terms of determining their overall satisfaction.

Each area within the VEM is then broken down into more detailed sub-areas (such as price and quality of service) with statistical modeling used to identify how satisfied visitors are with these sub-areas and how important each sub-area is.

  • Methodology

    The Visitor Experience Monitor (VEM) is an annual survey of 4,500 international visitors that have visited New Zealand primarily for holiday or to visit friends and relatives (VFR).

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  • Overall Experience

    Visitors from overseas were highly satisfied with their holiday experiences in New Zealand in 2010/11, rating their trip on average, 8.9 out of 10. Only a minority (11 per...

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  • Accommodation

    Satisfaction with accommodation in New Zealand was reasonably high in 2010/11, rated 8.4 out of 10. This is a 0.1 point decrease in satisfaction from last year.

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  • Activities

    The activities international visitors do while they are in New Zealand account for 30 per cent of the overall satisfaction they have with their trip to New Zealand. For...

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  • Arts Activities

    International visitors generally participated in less arts-related activities in 2010/11 than last year, the main cause of which seems to be related to visitors spending less time in New...

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  • Environment

    Visitors were highly satisfied with New Zealand's natural environment during the period July 2010 to June 2011, rating New Zealand's environment an overall average of 9.0 out of 10....

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  • Food and Beverage

    International visitors have rated food and beverage as their least satisfied component of a trip to New Zealand again in 2010/11 with an overall score of 8.1 out of...

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  • i-SITEs

    International visitors were generally very satisfied with i-SITE visitor centres in 2010/11, giving them an average rating of 8.6 out of 10, down 0.1 on last year.

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  • Māori Culture

    Overall, two out of every five international visitors participated in either an activity focused solely on Māori culture or an activity that had an element of Māori culture.

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  • Qualmark

    Qualmark is the New Zealand tourism industry's official quality accreditation programme. Jointly owned by Tourism New Zealand and the New Zealand Automobile Association, and backed by leading industry organisations,...

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