Newsletter : May 2003

NZTO Comment

by Garry Bond, General Manager, New Zealand Tourism Guide

The latest Government budget has announced an extra $15 million over three years to develop the 100% purenz tourism campaign in a bid to attract high spending interactive travellers. This follows closely on the heels of the announcement that $34 million will be given to Team New Zealand. The general feeling from the tourism industry is that the $34 million would have been better spent on direct tourism promotion so perhaps this $15 million is a nice carrot to move the focus away from the America's Cup challenge.

Whatever the reason though, the $15 million is certainly welcome. It's a timely input especially with New Zealand latched onto the back of the popular Lord of the Rings and the America's Cup. Tourism will now be able to promote itself well in the right places including the USA where last year we had more than 200,000 visitors who spent on average $4,000 each.

The New Zealand Government has recognised that tourism is a major contributor to the economy and, that without re-investment, our long term ride might be just that extra bit bumpy. As I've mentioned before, our country is in a position to take advantage of the traveller who wants to holiday in a safe, far away spot that can offer them the complete range of experiences.

New Tourism Business Centre

New Zealand Tourism Guide is continually striving to add value to your membership. To this end we have just launched a Tourism Business Centre for your exclusive use. Take a look at the new centre now. We will continue to develop the business centre site features and we welcome any feedback you may have.

In fact just visit the site and go into the free draw to win a fabulous bottle of Moet.

Business Centre Features:

• Web Tools - Gives you a snapshot evaluation of your Web site.
• NZTO Newsletter - Access to the latest and previous issues of this monthly newsletter including internet tips and tricks specifically geared towards tourism operators.
• Tourism Info - Hot links to the latest New Zealand tourism reports, news, upcoming events and research.
• NZ Content - Most Web sites need content and we are able to supply some.
• Inside Tourism - A professionally written publication for the tourism industry. If you don't get already, make sure you have a look at it. We are offering three free weekly issues.
• Official Member Button - If you haven't got one yet, then make sure you do. Looks great on your Web site.
• NZTG Link - Want to provide visitors to your site with a link to quality NZ information? Try one of our link buttons on your site.

Add this site to your favourites and visit regularly! www.tourism.net.nz/business-centre

Official Member Shield

In line with the business centre launch, we are now able to offer you an official member shield to recognise your status as a valued tourism business with New Zealand Tourism Online.

This is exclusive for our members and not only looks great on your Web site but helps aid your search engine status by connecting with a major NZ tourism portal. For more information about getting your membership shield click here.

The Google Dance

by Mark Rocket and Nick Butler, Avatar Web Promotions

Ever checked on your site in Google and found that it has vanished, only for it to reappear next time you look?

You've probably stumbled into the Google Dance. No, it's not the Google crew having a boogie, it's the regular update of the Google index.

Google searches more than 3 billion Web pages using 10 000 computers hooked into 8 data centres. When they tweak their search algorithm (the formula they use to rank sites) they can't just update their whole index at the press of a button. They test the new index at different data centres and if it works out they move it to the rest of the network.

Because all your searches don't necessarily go to the same server you can get a different version of Google each time so the results seem to be jumping all over the place. This is the Google Dance.

Google is constantly crawling the Web for new sites so their results change from day to day in what has come to be called the Everflux. To check if Google is really dancing you can go to these three different data centres – www.google.com, www2.google.com, www3.google.com - and check the number of links into a major sites such as Yahoo! by typing in link:www.yahoo.com. If the results are different then Google is groovin'.

These updates happen on other search engines but Google really is the major player in the search engine market.

Is NZ The Only One Benefit?

The Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA) has recently released tourism forecasts for 2003 to 2005. It seems that according to them, New Zealand may benefit from travellers redirecting away from unsafe destinations to ones that are deemed to be safe. They indicate that we can expect overall growth of 6.85% in 2003, 4.81% in 2004 and 5.31% in 2005.

Main growth between 2003 and 2005 is expected to come from the following areas;

• 4% from Australia
• 13.6% from the UK
• 24% from China
• 5.6% from Japan
• 19% from Korea

That's good news for New Zealand.

Interesting Internet Shorts

Here are a few snipits about what's happening on the Web.

• Wondering where the Internet is going? Into your pocket if Japan is anything to go by. According to an article in the Guardian the mobile phone is the Internet device of choice with young Japanese. There, as in New Zealand, email is the most popular Internet activity as boffins wrestle with the problem of squeezing a whole Web page onto a wee screen. This may change with Opera Software's new cellphone Web browser.


• Whose site is it anyway? Xtra's customers got a fright last month when the ISP added a clause to its terms of service giving Xtra "perpetual, royalty-free, non-exclusive, irrevocable, unrestricted, worldwide licence" to "use, copy, sublicense, redistribute, adapt, transmit, publish, delete, edit and/or broadcast, publicly perform or display" your content. The stroppy response must have given Xtra a fright too. They backed down immediately and according to the New Zealand Herald they are still a little touchy on the subject.


• Online travel sales in Western Europe increased 53 percent during 2002, according to the Centre for Regional and Tourism Research.
  
  Overall, travel sales in 2002 were worth EUR7.3 billion, or 3.5 percent of the tourism and travel market. This represented an increase of 1.2 percentage points on the figure for 2001.
  
  Air travel accounted for the bulk of online travel sales in 2002, accounting for 62 percent of total sales. Hotels and package tours were the second most popular choices, accounting for 12 percent of sales each. Rail travel was responsible for 10 percent of sales, followed by rental cars at three percent.