Destination Digital: How digital is transforming tourism marketing

6th December 2022 By Paul Yandall | paul@tourismticker.com | @tourismticker

Tourism operators are becoming increasingly digital-led in their marketing, a trend that started well before Covid and accelerated by the pandemic, an industry audience has heard.

Speaking on a panel at the inaugural Destination Digital event in Auckland on Tuesday, RealNZ chief executive Stephen England-Hall said bringing the diverse group’s brands under a single banner 14 months ago also spurred change.

“The biggest transition the company has made in digital transformation from a technology point of view is we now have an integrated technology and marketing capability that works across all of our experiences,” England-Hall told an audience of industry professionals at Wētā Unleashed Auckland.

“So, there’s been a huge transformation, we’ve changed all of our platforms, we’ve changed all of our systems, we’ve moved to data… and it’s going pretty well.”

The change helped drive direct-to-consumer acquisitions, an important growth opportunity for the Queenstown-based operator.

“We need to drive first-party relationships direct to consumer acquisitions, but in partnership with trade because there are audiences we will never reach directly and there’s a huge role for trade to play,” England-Hall said.

“The key for us is how do we use technology to make better more intelligent use of our incredibly valuable trade sales resources. It’s been a pretty exciting 12 months and a huge amount of work has gone into leading that transformation and we’re just getting started.”

For Northland’s Waitangi Treaty Grounds, the pandemic forced a dramatic rethink of its marketing, with 60% of its customers being international pre-Covid and unable to visit.

“With [Covid-19] lockdown happening in 2020 was a huge shock,” WTG’s head of sales and market, Nineke Metz, said.

“A lot of our marketing was targeted at internationals, not the domestic market.

“The main thing we did was repositioning our product line with children up to 18 free. We never really marketed that because internationals don’t bring children very often. So, suddenly it was like, we had to find a domestic market, a family market.”

Hobbiton Movie Set general manager Shayne Forrest said the Waikato operator’s digital transformation had started before the pandemic and it was now a digitally-led business.

“That’s quite a big change for us considering five years ago a majority of our business came through the trade channels,” Forrest said.

“Now, all our decisions are digitally-led and our strategy is to be sitting at about 70% of direct bookings as a business. We’re sitting at about that now but as you know that’s challenging to keep as internationals open up.

“Trade is always going to be a hugely important part of our business. We had a strategy of trying to work with every trade partner that we could. Now we are being very focused on who we are working with from the trade channels, which is mainly through the [Tourism Export Council of New Zealand] partners that we have. So, making sure we are going for quality over quantity.”

Destination Digital, organised by Maverick Digital, concluded on Monday evening.