Niue’s local businesses are expected to reap the benefits from a new comprehensive travel guide website launched this week that details what travellers can experience on the island.
The website, NiuePocketGuide.com is the first free online-guide of it’s kind for the island which receives 11,000 visitors a year.
It features 200 information articles on essential travel tips including things to do, what to pack, where to eat, maps and transport on the island as well as seasonal activities to name a few.
Created by couple Robin Censure and Laura Simmons who also own New Zealand’s largest travel guide website nzpocketguide.com, the site-owners say after a survey of 11,000 travellers they learnt the most common barrier for those travelling to the South Pacific was the lack of trustworthy information.
“Especially for a small nation like Niue that just doesn’t have the means to actually create a world class travel guide for themselves, we thought that there was a need to do that so we decided to take it upon ourselves to do it” says Censure.
The idea to create the website was raised with Niue’s Government a year ago when the couple approached the Government with a free offer to create the travel guide, what Niue Tourism Chief Executive Felicity Bollen says will make a “huge difference” for its local businesses.
“This website that we have is another resource that we have at our disposal to market in promotion, private sector tourism in Niue” says Bollen.
“Obviously small country; small budgets. We have to be really innovative and entrepreneurial about how we engage and how we get our best bang for buck out of our marketing budget. This opportunity has been godsend.”
With tourism forecast to be the island’s main economic driver in the future, marketers hope the website will allow for a continual steady flow of visitors.
“We’ve seen a steady increase of tourists in the last six years that I’ve been involved in tourism” says Bollen.
“We are up to about 11,000 now from 5000 when it started so it’s been a huge incremental growth but the growth has been steady and managed which is the way that we want to do it and the way that the Government expects that we grow so that we can manage it” she says.
“We don’t want too many people, Niue is not for everybody and it’s not for large numbers so we want to choose the people that come. We want to make sure they share our values around sustainability and that they share the values of the culture so that they don’t compromise anything”
But Bollen says she does not expect Niue to attain the same OECD developed nation status as its New Zealand realm sister the Cook Islands, who graduated this year due to high economic turn over from its tourism sector.
“That is not the goal that Niue is going for, Niue wants to retain its special sense of self and it’s identity. They are not like anybody else and they are not trying to be like anybody else, so they will develop at their own speed under their own rules and that’s all good with us.”
by Moana Makapelu-Lee
