Category Archives: Tourism

Finally, businesses are catered for on the popular image-based social media site, Pinterest!

Pinterest's premise is to provide an online space where users can curate their own pin boards of things they love, places that inspire, destinations they want to go, anything that's important to them that they want to share.

For the tourism business, this is great news. As a tourism product is experiential, images and video are what inspire and resonate with potential guests.

Some of the specific features for businesses which have been released previously include 'pin it' buttons, which you can add to your website allowing people to 'pin' their favourite content from your site. Awesome tours, stunning destinations and beautiful accommodations can all be pinned from...

For the last two years, Tourism New Zealand (TNZ) has been leading the parade celebrating the emerging markets for tourism businesses. Of these new markets, the spotlight is brightly shining on the Chinese traveller.

At numerous conferences and AGMs, a speaker will tell us what we need to do to prepare: including cooking Congee, preparing special teas, creating a Chinese website and being active on the Chinese social network, Weibo. They tell us that without creating a suitable environment for Chinese tourists to book and experience New Zealand, we'll miss out on the 'golden goose of tourism'.

Last week, I attended Tourism New Zealand's all day workshop on the Chinese and Halal market along with two others from the Tomahawk Team.

Our mission was to get the...

A total of US$126 billion in outbound travel expenditure was recorded in 2011 for the Muslim market, which came to 12.3% of the total global tourism expenditure. Indeed, the Halal (or Muslim) market is growing in prominence by the day. Projected travel expenditure values are at US$195 million for 2020.

For those who find the terminology perplexing at best - Muslim refers to a practitioner of the Islamic faith, and halal is a term designating any object or an action which is permissible to use or engage in, according to Islamic law (known as Sharia).

Businesses and services hoping to enter the halal/Muslim market need to bear in mind a few non-negotiable requirements of the Islamic faith. But before we get into that, here are a few useful facts about the Muslim...

As many of our readers are frequent users of our online booking and property management system, Resbook, we will be releasing some really helpful tips to help you understand how this online booking software can help you grow your business, and convert your website visitors into guests.

First up, we will go over adding specials to your rates in Resbook.

To access Specials in Resbook, head to Admin > Stock Configurations > Rates > Select the room type > Select the rate to which you wish to offer the Specials for.

Click on 'Create Special'.

Note: You should have already set up rate periods for your room type before you can create specials.

You can offer 3 different types of specials for your customers:

1) Pay a certain amount for a specified number of...

The growing on-line community is rapidly becoming THE marketplace to compete within.

Increasingly savvy browsers can hunt out the exact thing they are looking for, compare you against your competitors and find the price they want.

What this means for suppliers of a commodity (from accommodations to activities and rental cars to wine) is that you need a website that keeps it really simple, with information that is easy to find and an accurate portrayal of what you provide (or be at the mercy of an upset customer on TripAdvisor, Facebook or Twitter!) .

You have probably heard it all before, but the reason you keep hearing it is because it is vital to your business! Your customers are online, looking at your site and if you don't look after it, you could be losing potential...