Invite colleagues
This has been a great week for me as I run around the Southern hemisphere speaking at the ATEC and the ITOC events. Yesterday, I was the guest speaker at the Inbound Tour Operators Council of New Zealand (ITOC)'s conference. It was well attended with some 200 or so tourism sector folks, and the event produced some interesting topics from the hosting the Rugby World Cup next year to a more general presentations on the state of tourism. Interestingly, the theme's of many of the presentations supported the Asian (in particular, China) market as being the key focus of New Zealand inbound tourism.
My session gave me the opportunity to highlight the trends of digital marketing in China and showcase our social media analytics platform (SinoBuzz) for the tourism sector to monitor and understand what is being discussed online within social media sites worldwide (presentation is below).
If I was to sum up the general mood of the event, I would suggest most tour operators, hotels and car rental firms remained under stress from the financial downturn but where turing mildly optimistic given next years 2011 Rugby World Cup however they feared a general backlash (International visitors) from potential price gauging in the lead up to the rugby event.
For me the best presentation was from Kevin Bowler (Tourism New Zealand) how gave an update about the strategy of marketing New Zealand to the world and promoting inbound tourism. He also spoke of doubling the Chinese tourist numbers within 5 years and that China was one of 4 key geographies that would be targeted as source countries for these inbound tourists. An key element from Kevin's presentation was about looking for and targeting the "AC". AC being an 'Active Consider' for traveling to New Zealand. An AC was someone who intended to travel to NZ and was not bound strictly by demographic or a social economic profile. However, Kevin did note that AC's tended to be more educated, traveled and either pre/post the children phase. This is a different approach to Australian Tourism and other tourism groups that were looking more at a particular 'demographic segment' like 25-35 yrs, income level of $35,000 or more etc etc.
My friend, Chris Flynn from PATA delivered his polished presentation on tourism trends in the Asian market. With a particular focus on aviation and the adoption of airlines to purchase smaller single aisle aircraft (called equipment in the industry) rather than the more general view of airlines buying bigger craft such as the A380. It was not lost on me how Chris spoke of the number of new airports being built in China (an amazing 58 with another 33 being upgraded) over the next 12 years.
Please find my presentation that I delivered at ITOC.
Note: Big thanks to Air New Zealand and ITOC for sponsoring my trip to New Zealand.
Written on Thursday, 09 December 2010 08:48 by Matt McDougall