Tourism New Zealand Chief Executive Kevin Bowler's
column - first published in Tourism Business December 2011-January
2012 issue
The release of Tourism New Zealand's annual Visitor Experience
Monitor (VEM) provides key insights into what aspects of a New
Zealand holiday satisfies our visitors and where change may be
needed.
As the organisation charged with enticing international visitors
to our shores, we appreciate the important role research and
insights about visitor experience provides New Zealand tourism
operators, so they can deliver on visitor expectations once they
arrive.
The VEM is one of the ways we do this. Conducted annually and
surveying just over 4,500 international visitors, the research asks
visitors how satisfied they were with their experiences. This
provides a rich source of information across a range of areas that
the industry can use to modify their business and improve the
experiences it offers.
The latest results, for the period July 2010 to June 2011, are
generally similar with recent years with visitors rating their
holiday experience 8.9 out of 10 in terms of their overall
satisfaction.
While the overall satisfaction remains pleasingly high, some
decreases have shown up in certain areas - such as a 0.1 point out
of 10 decrease in satisfaction with food and beverage, activities
and safety.
While these decreases are relatively small they are worth
noting. Some of them are easier to influence than others. A theme
for 2010/11 is that our Australian visitors are spending less time
in New Zealand and participating in fewer activities, in turn
leading to a slightly lower satisfaction because of the strong
correlation between taking part in activities and overall
satisfaction.
The VEM also showed that what works for some markets, may be
missing the mark for others. New Zealand tourism operators have
some work to do to satisfy the high expectations of Asian visitors,
particularly those from China, Japan and Korea. These markets
showed satisfaction levels below those of our traditional western
markets.
Armed with this information, we can start to look at ways of
changing behaviour.
With almost all visitors (97 per cent) saying they had already
spoken of, or written positively about, New Zealand to others, we
are reminded of just how critical word of mouth is in marketing New
Zealand. We want visitors to go home and rave about their
experience here! It is ultimately about the conversations our
international visitors have about what they did, saw and
experienced that has a huge influence on bringing more visitors to
our shores.
To access the VEM visit the Markets & Stats section.