Tourism New Zealand

Tourism New Zealand is the government agency responsible for marketing destination New Zealand offshore. Established in 1901, the organization was the first of its kind in the world, and has continued a tradition of innovation when designing campaigns aimed at promoting New Zealand as a world-class tourism destination. The global marketing campaign "100% Pure New Zealand" is an example of such an initiative. It has won awards and successfully cut through the throng of tourism offerings to gain world attention. The internet was always going to be a key component of the campaign and indeed a critical element of Tourism New Zealand's overall strategy for reaching its target market; the techno savvy "interactive traveler."

At a Glance

URL - www.newzealand.com/travel

Business Challenge
Create a rich, multi-language experience for the user. Create an easily navigated high density multilingual information site that can be effectively managed from 4 continents.

Solution
Shado CMS Enterprise Edition, Shado CMS Multi-language Module.

Business Benefits
Greater marketing impact. Increased information on the site due to ease of use. Increased efficiency.

Facts & Figures
2004 Total Operating Revenue (mil.) - NZ$62
2004 Employees - 500
Database - Microsoft SQL Server 2000
Platform - Windows 2000 Server

About

Tourism New Zealand is the government agency responsible for marketing destination New Zealand offshore. Established in 1901, the organization was the first of its kind in the world, and has continued a tradition of innovation when designing campaigns aimed at promoting New Zealand as a world-class tourism destination.

The global marketing campaign "100% Pure New Zealand" is an example of such an initiative. It has won awards and successfully cut through the throng of tourism offerings to gain world attention. The internet was always going to be a key component of the campaign and indeed a critical element of Tourism New Zealand's overall strategy for reaching its target market; the techno savvy "interactive traveler."

Challenge

With its deep and broad marketing agenda Tourism New Zealand needed a website that would reflect the uniqueness of New Zealand as a country and play a central role in attracting visitors. An additional goal was to combine all of its marketing websites from around the world into a single architecture and to enable people to collaboratively manage a multilingual web site and its content regardless of their geographical location.

Four main areas required addressing:

1) Richness of experience. Customer surveys had revealed that visitors to tourism sites responded more favorably to rich experiences and large amounts of visual data.
2) Volume of information. Tourism New Zealand needed to post more information, more frequently, using fewer IT resources.
3) Organization of information. The large volume of information on the site needed to be structured in manner that ensured easy and accurate retrieval for the user.
4) Low maintenance system for high volume information site. With the existence of 15,000 site pages and content editors situated in 4 different continents, the system had to be easy to use and maintain.

Solution

Shado CMS Enterprise Edition.

Tourism New Zealand's twofold challenge of combining all of its marketing websites from around the world into a single architecture and of enabling staff to collaboratively manage a multilingual site and its content regardless of their location, was resolved using Shado CMS Enterprise Edition combined with Shado CMS Multi-language Module. This system was easily used by both content editors and those controlling the publication of their work. It also enabled editors and translators to operate effectively across 4 continents.

Results

www.newzealand.com/travel is the main site for attracting visitors to New Zealand. It lists more than 6,000 activities, visitor attractions, and accommodation options. Special features relating to current events and activities are continually updated, as are travel journals. Also featured are 40 driving routes combining New Zealand highlights and activities, and a full listing of visitor information centres.

Utilized here are some of the very best techniques available with Coldfusion to create a dynamic, integrated content manageable site. Newzealand.com currently attracts an average of 1.8 million page impressions per month. A new foreign language translation and workflow process was developed for the site in January 2003 supporting German, Traditional Chinese, Mandarin, Korean, and Japanese presentations and utilizing double byte characters.

Independent Tourism Operators. This involved redevelopment of the database and site that manages the registration of tourism operators for display and searching from the www.newzealand.com/travel site. This was a complex development as Tourism New Zealand is required to validate every operator that registers and every activity that they provide.

Tourism Info. This is an information site designed for the publication of material by tourism industry participants. The site provides a venue for interested parties to post news, events, reports and research data regarding New Zealand's tourism sector. A custom content management system was designed with a complex graphing engine for displaying survey results on the fly.