15 September 2005

New project to better understand tourist's needs

The New Zealand Tourism industry will gain new insights into visitor travel as a result of a project announced today by Tourism Minister Mark Burton.

The project involves the development of a regional-level data collection system to measure visitor’s travel motivations, expectations, behaviour and satisfaction.

“This research addresses a real gap in the tourism sector which has not looked into international and domestic customer-oriented information at a regional level,”
Mark Burton said.

The project is a partnership between the Ministry of Tourism, Tourism New Zealand and six participating regional tourism organisations - Tourism Auckland, Destination Rotorua, Positively Wellington Tourism, Christchurch and Canterbury Marketing, Tourism Dunedin and Destination Queenstown.

“This project is the first of its kind between national and regional tourism organisations. It will provide valuable insights for the tourism industry into visitor satisfaction and travel motivations in our regions,” Mark Burton said.

“Having this information will enable us to better develop strategies and policies based upon understanding our customer’s preferences and requirements.

“By coordinating this project at a national level we are able to make sure the data collected is consistent across the regions. We believe this project will provide the RTOs and national organisations with valuable benchmarking data for analysis in coming years.

“The initial agreement between the partners is for three years and will start next month. Once the project is fully developed, we hope to extend it by involving other parties, including additional RTOs or other groups.

“I thank the partners for committing to this important initiative and I am sure it will become a much relied upon feature of our information supporting tourism,” Mark Burton said.

ENDS

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