Visitor Experience Monitor 2011/12

Tourism New Zealand's annual Visitor Experience Monitor (VEM) is a survey of 4,566 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 behavioural 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.

Note: The Visitor Experience Monitor employs a different methodology and different survey techniques to the International Visitor Survey. The results from the two surveys should not be directly compared.

  • Visitor Experience Monitor summary

    Visitors still satisfied in New Zealand Overall satisfaction with a New Zealand holiday is unchanged at 8.9 out of 10. There has been a slight decrease of...

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  • Markets

    Each year Tourism New Zealand commissions independent research to gain a sense of how satisfied our international visitors are with the holiday experience New Zealand provides.

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  • Māori Culture

    The following information is a comprehensive summary on Māori culture from Visitor Experience Monitor results from the years 2008 to 2011.

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  • Methodology

    The Visitor Experience Monitor (VEM) is an annual survey of 4,566 international visitors that have visited New Zealand primarily for holiday or to visit friends and relatives (VFR).

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