Tourism "Experiences"

"Experience" is the latest buzzword to fall foul of tourism marketing people. Research tells them that "experiences" are what travellers want, therefore, as good marketing professionals, everything they look at suddenly become "experiences".

All of a sudden, a stay at a luxury lodge is now an "experience", made up of a host of complicated sub-processes. Your soap is an experience. Your bathsalts are an experience. Your breakfast and dinner are certainly experiences. And hopefully your bed is also remembered as an experience.

Being a simple person, I would prefer to label all of the above as "staying at a nice place", or "accommodation".

What I mean when I say experience, and please correct me if you think I am wrong, is something which happens when I am doing something outside of being hosted in accommodation. What used to be called an "activity".

But now we have the next danger - accommodation providers now suddenly posing as arrangers of quality experiences either on or off their premises. Every accommodation website now includes a page of activities, whereby accommodation providers attempt to increase the length of their average stays by keeping people in the region for longer.

While there is nothing wrong with one's good host recommending people and places in an area - that sort of thing has happened since my ancestors were drinking mead and probably before - the world has moved on a little since then. We have companies like ours which survive by being able to tie together experiences of New Zealand better than anyone else. We do this by combining hard work together with a real knowledge of client and country. Someone sitting in a lodge in the North Island may believe they have the best quad bike experience in the country just up the road. OK, it's the only one they've ever been on, but it's the best. We at Ahipara have been on lots and at this stage only recommend two to our clients.

Everyone understands now the importance of Maori culture as a tourism drawcard, and some even understand it is possible to find Maori outside Rotorua. Again we recommend very few experiences, although we must say that the natural hospitality and charisma of Maori make their standards very high. It then becomes a matter of selecting the right experience for the people you have in mind.

So I guess we are saying "buyer beware" and understand the motivations and experience of those you are asking advice from. Surely it is sensible wherever possible to ask advice from a trusted source which is demonstrably good in the field you are interested in. And turning down a bed for the night is not the same as selecting and managing the delivery of the top offroad motorcycling experience in the country.

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