Domestic travel focus during pandemic provided valuable lessons

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The Do Something New, New Zealand campaign featured actresses Madeline Sami and Jackie van Beek and featured work by Special Group and Tourism New Zealand.
Photo: Supplied / Tourism New Zealand

Tourism New Zealand wraps up its domestic marketing today after launching 15 campaigns in the past three years.

The organisation is responsible for promoting Aotearoa as a destination internationally, but it added local marketing to the mix due to the pandemic and border closures.

Tourism New Zealand spent $47.5 million on domestic marketing between May in 2020 and May this year.

New Zealand and Business Events general manager Bjoern Spreitzer said their best known campaign, Do Something New, New Zealand, added roughly $2 billion annually to the economy.

“Through our time we had 18 million visits to the domestic version of newzealand.com,” he said.

“That’s also resulted in five million enquiries or referrals to the tourism industry.”

There were plenty of lessons to learn from the foray into domestic marketing, including how they could influence travellers who were in the country.

“How they behave, what products they choose when they travel in New Zealand…”

Tourism New Zealand also learnt how it could use its partners, including the iSITE network, in a different way, he said.

“What happens if you get a visitors into an iSITE, what will they do differently, lots of those things we learnt through our domestic work and we can now apply to our international work as well.”

When the borders reopened, Tourism New Zealand shifted its focus back towards international marketing.

He was proud of what Tourism New Zealand had achieved.

“Having seen lots of the tourism businesses change their business model and some of those changes are still alive today which makes them – in general – an even more exciting industry visitors can now experience.”

The two staff working on domestic marketing have been redeployed into international work.

Spreitzer said a recent review included adding a provision for a future minister to activate domestic marketing that was linked to extreme events.