NZBIC

The Prime Minister of New Zealand John Key spoke to the backpackers industry conference today suggesting that many world economies are looking as if they're coming out of the recession, particulaly China which may prove to become a major market for backpackers. He spoke about preserving an image of being a safe country, with recent crimes agains tourists being potentially very bad for the industry. NZ Cycleway was mentioned as being a long term significant project to attract tourists to New Zealand.

$2m call to backpackers - Visitors are being encouraged to "go all the way" to New Zealand through a new $2 million marketing campaign targeting the backpacker market.Tourism New Zealand yesterday launched the campaign in Auckland at the first conference... [NZ Herald]

Tim's research in 2006 studied how users interacted with travel destination website, newzealand.com and evaluated their impressions of New Zealand after visiting this site. His findings were that people identified NZ through the marketing of New Zealand on this site as being a very "hands on" destination as opposed to destinations like Europe where people went for cultural experiences. Tim's findings on backpackers found that backpackers identified strongly as 'backpackers' and not 'tourists' but that much marketing was aimed at 'tourists' who had money for tourist packages and products.

Luiz Mendez-Filho spoke today about User Generated Content (UGC) and the rise of travel reviews. Luiz has discovered that 90% of backpackers use UGC reviews when choosing accomodation to book. His research suggests that backpackers don't look at anything that has below a %60 rating. Backpackers are high consumers of travel reviews and this requires backpacker websites to consider carefully the components of their design.

More on Luiz' PhD here: http://www.nztri.org/node/30