Results form our ‘How Much Do You Really Know About Australia’ Challenge have been surprising. In some cases even embarassing.

Since going ‘live’ in mid October, the ‘How Much Do You Really Know About Australia?’ challenge has been completed by well over 2,500 people. The Challenge includes 10 ‘easy’, 10 ‘medium’ and 10 ‘hard’ questions. Even some of the ‘easy’ questions proved to be quite a challenge for many.

While about 96% of respondents could correctly place the Sydney opera house as being in Sydney, we were a little concerned about that other 4%. It’s interesting what Australians do and don’t know about their own country. Are we really sports mad? 23% of respondents couldn’t identify the MCG from video footage. And only half of all respondents recognised Fraser Island’s unmistakable Lake Mackenzie.

Our press release (link below) on these results resulted in some useful air time on a number of radio stations around the country and The Challenge continues to attract visitors who usually share their results with others. We’ll update The Challenge with fresh questions periodically and keep an eye on the results.

It might just inspire a few more people to find out more and see more of Australia. Including that well known harbour side building somewhere in New South Wales.

Take the quiz yourself

Full press release

We’re able to track exactly what people using the DVD-ROM are looking at (provided they are on line). Our product features all 68 tourism regions of Australia equally. Each has an opening video and each has a number of locations within the region to click on and view more media and information. It’s designed to let people explore for themselves. What they view is entirely unprompted.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of us tend to look first at home. Where we live. While most of us probably aren’t going to play tourist at home, it’s always interesting to see what someone else has to say about where we live. Also, by looking at what’s been shown and said about a place you know, you can gauge how good the tool is likely to be at showing you places you don’t.

Overall, people who used the DVD-ROM used it extensively - and continue to do so. They spend an average of just over 20 minutes at a time viewing it, looking at many locations per session. What they look it is where it gets interesting.

In the main, that’s not the unusual and out of the way places, it’s those that most of us already have some appreciation of. Sydneysiders are a little more outward looking than Tasmanians, who tended to look a lot at Tasmania before venturing further afield, but both Sydney people and Tasmanians looked more at better known destinations.

While Sydneysiders looked a lot at the Sydney region, they chose the Blue Mountains National Park (quite close to home but still a tourist destination) Uluru, Melbourne and Adelaide as some of their most favoured locations. Tasmanians looked first at Tasmanian regions, then Melbourne, then other Tasmanian locations. Whether that’s more ‘looking at home’ or a desire to do more exploring close to home, we can’t be sure, but we continue to gather data and improve our understanding of what the market looks at - unprompted.

While the information we have collected is purely quantitative, some conclusions can be drawn. The most significant of those would appear to be that it takes a long time and a lot of money over a long period to establish awareness of and interest in a location as a tourist destination. For well known destinations, maintaining and improving that awareness is an ongoing task. For lesser know destinations, the task is substantial and requires not just money, but innovation and long term commitment.

Destinations with already high profiles attracted more visitors (Far North Queensland pictured).

In ranked order, the locations visited were:

Sydney Distribution:

Most Popular Regions
Sydney
Tropical North Qld
Gold Coast
Australia’s North West
North Coast NSW
Tasmania’s South
Whitsundays
South Coast NSW
Northern Tasmania
Cradle Coast

Most Popular Locations
Blue Mountains National Park
Uluru
Melbourne City
Adelaide City
Hawkesbury
Cairns
Broome
Port Douglas
Bondi Beach
Manly

Tassie Distribution:

Most Popular Regions
Tasmania’s South
Northern Tasmania
Cradle Coast
Gold Coast
Tropical Notrth Queensland
Sunshine Coast
Melbourne
Whitsundays
Perth
Darwin & Surrounds

Most Popular Locations
Melbourne City
Bruny Island
Mt Wellington
Cockle Creek
Hobart
Richmond (Tasmanias South)
Strahan
Bay of Fires
Tasman Peninsula
Dunalley

We’ll continue to collect data and continue to share it with you, as well as our thoughts as to the implications.

Distribution Report

We’re now adding more location videos and will eventually have more than 1200 accessible through You Tube.

PleaseTakeMeTo.com videos are also now appearing on an increasing number of operator web sites. They’re available for any operator to use and can help add depth to a site - not to mention giving visitors more reason to come and visit for real.

Visit: http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=pleasetakemeto

PleaseTakeMeTo.com has just been dramatically upgraded to make finding what you’re interested in faster and easier. In fact, one of our new navigation tools is a pull down menu entitled ‘I am interested in’ with a number of options to select from. We’ve also integrated Google maps into the site in a way that delivers much more than any other site we’ve seen (see below).

You can still take in the vast amount of video and high quality pictures offered by PleaseTakeMeTo.com - the largest collection of rich media on Australian tourism anywhere - but you can also get to exactly the information you want in double quick time.

Say you’re looking for 4 to 4 and a half star accommodation at Surfers Paradise on the Gold Coast - with gynmnasium, office and conference and office facilities. Within a couple of clicks, you’ll find 9 options to suit. And it’s just as easy to find, say, winery tours in Southern Tasmania.

We have a number of other excellent innovations in production which will be rolled out in coming months. All of them, along with those that have just gone live, are designed to deliver more functionality and a more involving, interesting experience to the user and greater value to our advertisers. It’s well worth spending a few minutes on the site to see how good this new functionality is.

Google maps are becoming ubiquitous on line. And for good reason. But PleaseTakeMeTo.com has taken now them further and provided better value for the user than anyone else we’ve seen.

You can use a Google map in PleaseTakeMeTo.com to not only pinpoint locations on the macro and micro scale (all our advertisers have markers) and to check out if a ‘beachfront property’ really IS a beachfront property, but to find other things around that location of interest.

Say, for instance, you’ve had a look at some excellent video, photos and information on Hobart and decided to pay a visit. You specify the type of accommodation you’re after, get your shortlist and make a choice. Then, you can look at natural attractions within 20 kilometres of your hotel. They’ll all come up with markers on the Google map. Each one can be clicked on for photos and video (if available) and if you like, you can proceed to make a booking.

You might then want to look at tours or attractions closer to your hotel. Just select tours and attractions within 1 kilometre and they’ll all show up on the map in the same way. All clickable for further media and info and all with direct contact details.

For advertisers, this is real value adding. It lets customers find you, be happy with what you have to offer and gives them the means to get in touch with you directly - or go through a booking engine if you prefer.

Google Maps are an excellent tourism marketing tool. In coming months, PleaseTakeMeTo.com will be introducing more and better ways to use them to make the travel planning and booking experience ever better. Please take a few minutes to look at how the PleaseTakeMeTo.com Google map interface is working now. We’re sure you’ll like it.

Users of PleaseTakeMeTo.com will find accommodation venues that exactly suit them, then be able to check availability and make bookings instantly and seamlessly through the RoamFree system. This move is part of our ongoing efforts to provide the consumer with ever more options - and to keep them coming back for more.

Rebecca and Bounce Walking Tours customers.

Tracker: How long have you been running Bounce Walking Tours?
RG: Coming up for 2 years.

Tracker: How’s business?
R.G.: Good. Very good.

Tracker: How many people are working in the business at the moment?
R.G.: There’s myself and 6 guides. There could probably be more but you have to have the right people and that’s not always easy.

Tracker: What were you doing before you started Bounce?
RG: I worked in financial marketing. Nothing to do with tourism at all.

Tracker: So what made you start the business?
RG: I’d done a lot of walking tours in cities around the world; Berlin, Prague, Rome, Paris, London and decided that there was room for more walking tours in Sydney. At that time you could only do a walking tour of the Rocks and there’s a lot more to Sydney. There was a latent demand and we’re meeting it.

Tracker: What’s the best part of the job?
R.G. Definitely the people. You get to meet people from all over the world and they invariably end up having a good time.

Tracker: Does any one day or experience in running Bounce Walking Tours really stand out.?
R.G.: No one single day, but it’s always a good day when we get customers from a direct referral. It means what we’re doing is working and that’s pretty important in any business.

Tracker: Where does your market come from?
R.G.: It depends on the tour. Our city sightseeing tours are mostly international people with a few from interstate. Our Kings Cross tour is probably 1/3 Sydneysiders, which is nice to see, 1/3 interstate and 1/3 international. Of the international people, the bulk are from the U.K. and the U.S.
We’re introducing new tours like the Oxford Street shopping tour which is attracting a lot of women from interstate and overseas.

Tracker: What do you see as the biggest challenge for tourism in Australia and in Sydney in particular at the moment?
R.G.: The strong Aussie dollar. We’re noticing that Americans in particular now seem to be ‘going away to think about it’ a bit more often where they would previously have made a booking on the spot. Operating in Sydney is always a challenge because there’s so much quality competition but that just keeps us all on our toes.

Tracker: Where do you put most of your marketing efforts?
R.G.: We’re active on line and we have some good agents that we work with.

Tracker: How do you track where your marketing efforts?
R.G.: We aways ask where people have found us and record that information. It does give you a pretty good picture of what’s working.

Tracker: How important is your brand in terms of your marketing efforts?
R.G.: Absolutely critical. The brand is what people see…it’s your reputation in the market and it influences everybody that you work with at every level. You have to be consistent, especially in the customer experience. With a name like ‘Bounce’ we need our guides to be bright and happy and fun. So in keeping your brand values strong the people on your team are really important.

Tracker: Do you have any words of advice for smaller operators?
R.G.: Keep innovating. You just can’t stand still. You need to be providing the market with new, different and stimulating product. If you stay the same, you go stale.

Another 15,000 PleaseTakeMeTo.com DVD-ROMs will be hitting the streets through the Sunday Tasmanian on September 30th, 2007. This distribution will be supported by mainstream advertising on television, radio, in the Hobart Mercury and in point of sale. This follows on from the success of the Sunday Telegraph (N.S.W.) distribution. We hope to announce more newspaper based distributions of the disk in the coming weeks.

Our revolutionary web linked tourism DVD-ROM has engaged tens of thousands of Australians in the weeks following its release through The Sunday Telegraph.

The giveaway has been an overwhelming success. In the first week alone following the PleaseTakeMeTo.com DVD-ROM giveaway, our stats show that more than 20,000 unique users spent an average of 20 minutes exploring the disk’s wealth of video, photographs and information. Unique users from that distribution now number around 40,000, with substantial numbers of people continuing to put the disk in their computers for the first time.

Hundreds of orders for additional DVD-ROMs have also been taken through the PleaseTakeMeTo.com web site with disks being delivered to people around the world on an ongoing basis.

Users can view full screen video instantly from the DVD-ROM but all information on the product is updated automatically whenever a user is online, so it’s always up to date.

Disk use can only be measured while a user is on line, so the actual number of users is likely to be far higher.

It’s an excellent start and we’re now exploring a number of ways to get more disks into the hands of interested users. We expect to be making some exciting announcements in this area over the coming weeks.

PleaseTakeMeTo.com’s aim is to get more disks into the hands of really interested people - people more likely to be booking a holiday in the near future.

- The first 5,000 Australia Zoo branded PleaseTakeMeTo.com DVD-ROMs are planned to be delivered next month for Australia Zoo to distribute. These will begin with an Australia Zoo opening movie which resolves on the Australia Zoo multi media listing (well worth a look). The remainder of the PleaseTakeMeTo.com product is easily accessible and works normally. Customised disks like this are an excellent promotional tool for major properties and we expect many more operators to make use of them.

- 2,000 disks will soon be distributed in a travel promotion for ABSCO sheds.

- The first batch of 5,000 disks for distribution through registered clubs in Queensland should also be delivered within a few weeks. A a charity will benefit from a gold coin donation for each disk.

Region specific versions of the PleaseTakeMeTo.com web linked DVD-ROM will also soon be available. These are excellent tools for regional tourism bodies and operators. The user will be asked to type in a code from the disk cover. As a result, the first thing they see is a video and other content on a specific region. The rest of Australia will still be accessible and function in the same way, but for this version the (say) Sunshine Coast will always play first, providing a great tool to promote the region. Distribution for these disks is in planning and will be announced soon. Stand by.

The first edition of The Traveller has been launched! The online publication includes exclusive offers and deals for PleaseTakeMeTo.com users, stories about places you’ve probably never heard of and some truly unique events. The newsletter is an exciting, high value initiative which aims for real consumer engagement. Readers subscribe themselves to the newsletter, with over 2000 interested subscribers already on the mailing list.

The Traveller is set to help people discover even more of Australia using PleaseTakeMeTo.com and explore regions which they may have never considered visiting. Advertisers are encouraged to use the online newsletter as a promotional tool for their own region and are free to link to the newsletter when the issue is relevant to their product or location.
Take a look at The Traveller here.

PleaseTakeMeTo.com has just initiated an arrangement with the Sunday Telegraph On-Line to carry PleaseTakeMeTo.com videos in its ‘Escape TV’ section. This is a part of a major re-vamp of the Sunday Telegraph web site and is likely to generate very substantial traffic, for both the Sunday Telegraph and PleaseTakeMeTo.com.

Take a look here