Can Youth, Backpacker & Adventure Travel Help Double Tourism Turnover in New Zealand?, with Haydn Marriner, BYATA

Hello and welcome to the High Yield Tourism podcast. I'm Gary Bowerman. On today's show I'll be discussing the changing outlook for backpacking youth and adventure tourism in New Zealand with Bay of Plenty based Hayden Mariner. So let's get started. This is High Yield Tourism. Hello and thanks for listening in today. It's my pleasure to welcome to the show Hayden Mariner Brand Development Manager for Tourism Bay of Plenty and Board Chair for Backpacker Youth and Adventure Tourism Association of New Zealand BY-ATA to discuss the evolving challenges and opportunities of youth tourism and backpacking. A segment of international travel that New Zealand has historically welcomed supported and championed. So Hayden, thanks so much for coming on the show. How are you doing and where are you today? Thank you for having me on the show. I really appreciate the opportunity to speak on behalf of the Backpacker Youth and Adventure Tourism Association of New Zealand. Currently I am located in the heart of tourism in New Zealand and a place called Boral Tourua. Which has been welcoming international visitors since before New Zealand was even a recognized country. So it's a very historic tourism destination. It's a legacy destination is what we would call it in New Zealand. It's the one place in the country where the Māori population here has actively been working and running tourism since it started. So it's quite a cool space to look and want to encourage listeners to visit. Fantastic, it's a beautiful part of the world. I have to say I'm Rotorua as a beautiful place. So Hayden, let's start with a brief introduction. Tell us a bit about your career journey and your roles that you hold at Bayer Plenty and the Backpacker Youth and Adventure Tourism Association. Awesome, thank you. So I am by trade a copyright. So I started out with the idea that I was going to get into advertising and then I was seduced by the idea of working for tourism in New Zealand when I was leaving university. And what I didn't know was that I was going to fall in love with my own country and marketing and selling it off and selling it as a visitor destination to the rest of the world was immensely rewarding. And while friends of mine were, you know, working for Talcos, making sure that their business development contracts were moving as many cell phone products for Vodafone as possible, I was marketing New Zealand. And so the fulfillment I was able to get versus the probably the financial reward was much higher tourism historically doesn't pay as well as other business sectors, particularly in the sales space. But I was always really proud of the work I did and I always thought I had cooler work stories. And so when you're young, that kind of social credit is really important because while my friends were talking about, you know, maybe moving, like you said, selling cars or working for uni-leaver, I was talking about going what would a rafting with media from around the world. And so, I think my story had a little bit more relevance in my peer group. And so I got hooked into it that way. And I've never been able to leave. And this is now 20 year, 21 working in tourism in the professional capacity. I've helped jobs for tourism New Zealand, tourism's holdings limited, which is the largest tourism entity in New Zealand. I've worked for Kentucky, which was awesome. And I recommend to anybody who's young, get it, get it the front of a tour bus, take visitors around your own country, take them around Europe and just experience being at the forefront of the visitor experience. Because nothing's cooler than taking guests, travellers around your own country and showcasing it to them face-to-face. It's immensely rewarding. I have landed and working for local government. So I've worked in local government, regional tourism organizations, destination,�todora, and then in its second iteration as Rotorua NZ, both looking after the brand and marketing functions there. Before recently making the move over to tourism Bay of Plenty, to develop a fresh and new identity and a place brand for the Todonga, Western Bay of Plenty sub-regions. So I enjoy my job, and I'm quite lucky because I get to hang up with awesome people and tourism people of the beast. So, really. 100% agree with that. And so let's dig a little bit more into the backpacking and youth tourism, Hayden. My experiences in New Zealand, I came to New Zealand as a backpacker many, many years ago. I won't tell you how many, but it's a long time ago now. And I enjoyed all the aspects of backpacking and youth traveling. And at that time, this is a long time ago. New Zealand was one of the destinations that really catered to this. So let's take a step back. How did this all develop? And why has it become such an important segment for New Zealand's tourism economy? Young people have always travelled. And New Zealand being where we are. We're a quite an exotic destination to visit. We're quite relaxed and friendly country where we're reasonably middle of the road. We're quite progressive with a lot of our thinking. And so it's a reasonably safe community to visit across New Zealand. And so visitors have safely been able to, you know, going back a few years. Hitch Hike, which you don't do anymore, but that used to be a staple of young persons travel. And now around New Zealand and then stay in small places, be welcomed into communities as family. My family did it all the time. We would pick people up Hitch Hiking on the way home. And then, you know, they'd be from all over the world. And that would be a really great way to extend what we Māori called a tenant, a value of ours called Manaki Tunga. And it's one of the three big tenants of being Māori is Manaki. And that's actually called reciprocal respect. So we bring you in as a guest and then you show us respect by being a good guest. And that's part of our culture here. And it's been fantastic over the years because that was the foundation for a large amount of our visitor economy. Young people are more intrepid. They stay longer. They visit more places. They get more involved in the culture. And culture's not just one aspect. It's the culture. It's all cultures and all spaces. And it's really, really, really awesome to be able to say this. But youth travelers are the biggest vendors in New Zealand. And we're the, we're people tend to go wrong. And I think this happens with older people. And I'm standing again to that as we start to view young people through old people's eyes. So we don't see value in them sleeping in tents and maybe eating two minute noodles. But what we're not seeing is that they just went and spent $1,000 on skydiving. Yeah. And they stay longer as well, right? And because they're around for eight weeks minimum, you know, we're getting, we're getting in that, and they visit between seven and nine regions of New Zealand. We get a fantastic regional dispersal. And they tend to come away as real advocates for New Zealand. And then as social media and New Zealand became more popular and venture tourism took off, we really became a hotbed for youth activity. And quite fortunately, we had these amazing three, three hour commercials that were going around the world in the early 2000s. You may remember them. They're called the Lord of the Rings. And suddenly we were inundated with young youth traveling, Lord of the Rings. They were just running New Zealand on mass and their gravitas bought their friends. And then they went home and young people do this amazing thing, which has become the best word of mouth advocates. You can ever get. And if they love it, they rave about it. And then they send their friends. And then if they get take a working holiday visa, their parents come out to see their children. And so now this one traveler who came out for this one reason just to get away from the UK has now suddenly bought six people with them and their parents. And so those youth visitors, if we can capture them and they visit us between 18 and 35, our research shows that they visit them up to four times during the lifetime. And often that cycle of word of mouth, sending friends, sending family bringing family over. And then it's because New Zealand's been around for a wee while. We've got grandparents who are sending their grandchildren who visited, they first visited when they were in their tweenies. That's fascinating. So many countries around the world, Hayden, no longer really promote backpack or youth tourism. Some used to some have gone more upscale. They've changed their segmentation. New Zealand has stuck with this. And it has a very, very structured way of looking at it. So tell us a bit more about the backpacker youth and adventure tourism association. How do you work with national organizations and with tourists and with tourism organizations, your stakeholders to promote this segment and to develop it. And the backpacker youth and adventure tourism association of New Zealand, we call ourselves by art. If you're wanting to drop that, we leave out the NZ otherwise it becomes a bit too much of a word soup, but our focus is really being on. Partnership and advocacy. Our desire has always been to work with national organizations, the Tourism Industry Association of Altair. great partners of ours, hospitality, NZ, great partners of ours, tourism, NZ, great partners of ours. And we all try to work collaboratively so that we can see that there are focused efforts at driving the youth experience in NZ. And that's born out of the organisations that make up our membership. And by the way, we're not a huge organisation, we're at our biggest, we were maybe 200 at the moment, we're 150. So we're not a huge organisation. But we are the brands. And that's the key part is that because we're youth brands, we're we're zooled. We are AJ Hackett, Bungee Jumping, you know, we're the Skini divers, we are the white water rafters, we're the mountain bikers. You know, all that stuff is part of what makes the New Zealand law so appealing. You know, it's the it's the mystique, the mythology around what a New Zealand experience is, which is getting out there, doing stuff and experience and tasting yourself, which the adventure tourism offering has always been really strong with in New Zealand. And sometimes, as you point out, different market segments start to take a bit more voc. And of course, it's natural. It's natural that as marketers and a country becomes more sophisticated, we all would like to do less work for more money. So the luxury cluster becomes really, really appealing to tourism marketers. The issue with the luxury cluster, though, is that it's regional spread and diverse and regional dispersal is incredibly low. Because someone who's paying $3,000 a night for a large room is unlikely to leave the lodge at $3,000 a night. Whereas our youth travelers, they spend more, they stay longer, they get more involved in our communities. And they do this other thing and it's it's it's it's pertinent to point this out now. They're cool on social media. So the advertising we get is much better than our grain nomad travelers. So the so the the and and and value of the youth segment is incredibly high for New Zealand. Yeah. And that's that's just the leisure travelers. Before we get into our favorite area of advocacy, which is working holiday visas. Yeah, we'll come to that in a moment, Hayden, but you're absolutely right. The social advocacy of youth travel today has changed dramatically in recent years. And I want to I want to tap on that a little bit because COVID and particularly in our region, Asia Pacific, you know, borders were closed for a long time. It put all of these segments on hold. How has the youth travel segment rebounded in recent years? Has it changed? So and this is where advocacy starts to come into play. It's been really challenging for every organization, every country to come out of COVID and recover as quickly as possible. And what's tough in New Zealand? It was always going to be when next to Australia, and we had a change of government, and we were not able to fund tourism, particularly tourism promotions for growth in the way that Australia had. And so our youth market and our youth segment while still making up the largest portion by age demographic of visitors to New Zealand is also proportionately not doing the businesses in that space and not doing as well. So the struggle for us is to take a very small pie and try and influence our national marketing organization and direct them into some youth focused events. And they are doing they're doing the absolute best, but they are just losing a funding war with the states of Australia before we get into dealing with tourism Australia, which is this mammoth marketing organization. And the states of Australia, particularly the mainland states, Queensland, New South Wales, South Australia, Western Australia, they absolutely know 100% that the gem on their bread is youth tourism. They are absolutely focused on thriving it because they know that it is the platform that they build all the rest of their marketing off. And in a lot of that comes down to just marketing understanding 101. Who are the cool people that provide the influence to others? And I don't like using the word influences because that gives a social media. No, I'm just saying who are the social leaders? Who decides what trends are cool? It's youth travelers 18 to 35 without kids, sinks and dinks. And it's the same thing with our senior citizens, they're not not cool, they just don't have the social influence to decide on trends. So if you can attract 18 to 35 to your country, which is Australia, absolutely targets, then the rest of it all follows because people want to go where the cool kids are. It's natural, it's part of our human instinct. And we're trying to help to work with tourism as you learn to drive that direction then, because we just see limitless opportunities, particularly with our current government's target of trying to double the tourism turnover by 2050, which is completely doable, but we would need all segments firing. And in particular, the youth segment would need to be absolutely tripling what it's pulling right now, which means numbers would have to go up. And the only way to do that, you got a fun for growth. Yeah, absolutely. So at this point of redevelopment after COVID, we're halfway through the decade, 2025. And biateurs put together a five-year strategy over to cover the next portion really through through 2029. What are some of the core elements of that? How will you be trying to drive the youth segment? So our strategy focuses on advocacy for improved visa settings and targeted youth marketing for those working holiday visas. A strategy involves collaboration with our partnership organisation. So you know, you would have heard me mention tourism industry, Altairoa Hospitality NZ Tourism Museum, the Ministry of Business Investment and Economics, and our regional tourism organisation of partners. And this is quite hard to do, but we're working as we have a five-year strategy on this. It's actually building sector insights and benchmarking ourselves against international travel trends, because it's really hard to get good data to make an argument with. You know, it's hard to measure spend when you don't have the tools to do so. So if we can get a really clear picture, embed a clear picture of what our visitors are doing, where they're traveling and how they're experiencing using them, we can then become better advocates for them. And at the same time, we always want to be taking a great seats check of what the rest of the world is doing. Great to get ideas. There's nothing's more flattering than imitation. But to also gauge about gauge where we are. How are we doing? Because if we only compare ourselves with ourselves, geez, I could tell you we're doing great, but I don't know. I don't know if Australia, I don't know what's going on. If I don't know what's going on Australia, I can't learn from them. I can't compare. I can't look at the percentages. And then probably the last bit of our strategy is expanding our membership and making sure that we're strengthening our own internal governance structures and making sure that our membership is exposed and gazed and feel part of the advocacy and journey that we're trying to take the industry on. We are all members of Bayarta, so our position isn't as one of selfishness. We are simply trying to support everybody equally. And the unique thing about the Bayarta board is that we're all here for selfless reasons. None of us are paid. All of this work is voluntary. All of the time is voluntary. So this is a real passion project for us. So Hayden, you've mentioned a couple of times the working holiday days. Let's go into that in a bit of detail because not many countries around the world actually offer this scheme. New Zealand has for many, many years. I came as a working holiday visa tourist many years ago. Tell us how it works and why it's important. The working holiday visa is actually, and this is all you'll love this. We did a strategy, a piece of research with visa consulting around the lifetime value of the visitor. Through that, we were able to ascertain an estimated value of working holiday visa spend in New Zealand, which is usually like the minimum of two years. And over that two year period, working holiday visa holders estimated to spend $60,000 New Zealand dollars. That is incredibly significant. That is incredibly significant value to the community. And so we are able to track them as leisure spenders. Because Hayden, they're earning and spending at the same time. Now would it absolutely, absolutely now would it. So when they arrive as leisure spenders, we're able to track them as international visitors because they're using international credit cards. But the moment they become New Zealand, they get a New Zealand bank account. They disappear into the ether of domestic bliss. And so it took us a really long time to work out and land on that number. But they are contributing on such a phenomenal level to the New Zealand ecosystem. That in some cases, they are marrying in genetically. They are contributing as well. So, you know, it's one of those great things about cultural exchange where young people connect with each other. They provide economic value. They're a mobile workforce. And then in some cases, they fall in love and end up on a farm in Hunterville. You know, it's all this kind of great stories, great interactions that make the visitor economy so cool for people to be part of. And we've got to understand that the working holiday visa for New Zealand is a real, real bonus because every working holiday visa holder that lands in New Zealand creates 1.2 jobs. - Interesting. So you're coming up to, you've come out of winter, you're coming through autumn, you're coming up to peak season. What's the outlook for the next few months? Is it looking positive? - Well, I think New Zealanders, if you've met many New Zealanders, we are quite positive by nature. We like to be generally pretty resilient. And our Māori people like myself, we always love a joke in a laugh. And so, despite the fact that we're still only at 85% of pre-COVID numbers, we're very, very, very grateful for what we do have. While we're not past the pre-COVID numbers yet, and we know that we'll come, what it does mean is that we get to enjoy the interactions that we have with our visitors, 'cause there's less pressure on them. We're able to our staff are enjoying themselves a lot more. And yes, we aren't making least money, but we just came through COVID, so we're just deeply appreciative of having visitors again and just going getting back to that kind of normalcy. Yep, we'll get back to pre-COVID. Yep, we'll probably pass those numbers at some point. But the important part about working in the visitor economy is we get to have visitors in our economy again. And so, some is looking pretty, pretty good. But we also are mindful that there is more to life than being absolutely swamped. I love that positivity, and you're absolutely right. That is a real New Zealand trait. But we've discussed a lot of different aspects, and we're running out of time ahead, and it's been fascinating to hear insights about how this segment is so important to the New Zealand economy. If we just sort of project into the future, if you and I were having this conversation in 12 months' time, what different things would you want to be talking about? How would you want to have seen development grow over the next year? As an advocacy organisation, we're working consistently with Minister of Tourism and Hair Office Tourism Museum and the Ministry of Tourism, and what we're trying to achieve genuine outcomes. So, I would hope that in 12 months, I'd be able to sit there and say, hey, we were able to work with tourism in New Zealand to bring a first of its kind, youth tourism-focused campaign to anywhere in the world. I would hope that we would have some kind of targeted funding to market the working holiday visa scheme. I would hope that those have outcomes where I can say to you the numbers that have been coming into New Zealand have increased as a direct result of that market intervention, which would be awesome. And then, probably lastly, I would like to see some real development and growth for the youth tourism and adventure product offerings that we have. We've seen some amazing innovation in tourism come from New Zealand. I mentioned AJ Hackett Bungie and Zorb, which is its own verb, how cool is that. And then on top of that, we've got these great hostels, which have just opened Drifter and Lilo, which have now started in New Zealand and then gone Trans-Tasmin. We're hoping to see more high value, high experience, youth accommodation options. And that says to me, when we have that targeted youth accommodation options, there were an industry on the rise because if you're building beds, you're building beds for capacity. And that's awesome. And so I hope that's the conversation that we're able to have in a year's time. And then at the end of it, I'm hoping I'll be able to put a dollar metric on it and say, hey, we're able to make an extra half billion dollars for the youth tourism sector in the last 12 months. We increased, sorry, spend by a half billion dollars. So it'd be great. Terrific. So we've set an agenda. We'll make a date. In a year's time, we'll have another conversation and see where we're at. Hayden has been fascinating to talk to you. Thanks so much for your insight. Thank you. Stock to be here. That's a wrap for this edition of the High Yeal Tourism Podcast. A fascinating look at the youth tourism focus in New Zealand. Not many countries around the world do focus on this segment, but New Zealand really, really does. And it's a real leader. So thanks to Hayden for his insights and his approach. Please join the conversation on our LinkedIn page at High Yeal Tourism. That is a hyphen in the middle. It's at High High-Fan Yeal Tourism. And we'll be back soon to talk more High Yeal Tourism. See you next time. [MUSIC]