MEDIA RELEASE : SEPTEMBER 2005

For Immediate Release

22nd September 2005

Internet Company Shines At New Zealand Tourism Awards

New Zealand Tourism Online (NZTO) celebrated last night as they won two awards, the Telecom People's Choice Award and a Category Winner - Tourism Communications and Information at the New Zealand Tourism Awards.

The New Zealand Tourism Awards are the tourism industry's prestigious annual event, recognising business excellence. The award entry is based on the rigorous Baldrige Quality Program and involves a major written submission and two rounds of assessment and judging.

It is the second time running that NZTO has won the Telecom People's Choice Award.

Only in its 8th year of operation, NZTO was established in 1997 as a conduit between the country's tourism-related businesses and the web-savvy, information-hungry visitor to New Zealand. With just 20 listed companies at inception, NZTO now lists over 12,000 tourism operators.

"It's fantastic to receive these awards as it recognises the hard work put in by the team and it's a real vote of confidence for us by the public and the industry", say Director and Business Development Manager, Cambel Ferguson.

NZTO's Web site, www.tourism.net.nz, attracts 350,000 visitors per month and is a figure that has doubled each year since 2002. Those visitors have access to over 28,000 web pages brimming with tourism related information specifically aimed at inspiring people to visit and travel within New Zealand.

Search engines play a major role in NZTO's success and the web site is consistently ranked on the first page of results in all major search engines. "For the past several years we have invested heavily in the research and development of new search engine optimisation techniques and this combined with the increased size of the web site has really paid off", says Director Mark Rocket.

NZTO has recently been ranked in the top three travel related web sites by Nielsen NetRatings. The number one site was Air New Zealand followed by Tourism New Zealand's www.newzealand.com consumer web site. "This is an independent measure of how well our site is performing on the internet", comments Cambel Ferguson, "and considering New Zealand Tourism Online is a privately owned company of only 10 people, we've very pleased to be ranked so highly against much larger organisations".

NZTO won the People's Choice Tourism Award at last year's New Zealand Tourism Awards and is a finalist in the Champion Canterbury Awards, to be announced tonight. It was ranked as 13th fastest growing company in New Zealand in 2004 by Deloittes, up from its 22nd ranking in 2003. The company has also been ranked as one of the top 100 fastest growing technology companies in the Asia Pacific area for the last two years.

Ends