Transform Your Tourism Business with AI

In 2025, 84% of travel companies worldwide recognise AI as essential for staying competitive—yet too many NZ tourism operators are falling behind.

In fact, 95% of Kiwi SMEs using AI report higher revenues (according to salesforce.com). This masterclass will teach you hands-on how to use AI in your tourism marketing, freeing you from repetitive tasks so you can focus on delighting guests and visitors.

This "NZ Tourism Marketing AI-Enhanced Masterclass" is designed specifically for you. It acknowledges the dedication and hard work already invested in marketing efforts. The goal is not to replace invaluable experience and intuition, but to introduce the transformative power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools.

This course will equip you with practical, immediately actionable strategies and demonstrate how AI can streamline marketing processes, enhance reach, and ultimately help your business thrive. By the end of this course, you will be able to leverage AI to work smarter, not harder, in promoting the unique experiences you offer.

And each lesson gives you access to a unique, customised AI tool designed to help solve the marketing challenges you face.

The AI Opportunity: Your Strategic Co-pilot

This course positions AI as a strategic co-pilot, a tool designed not to replace the invaluable knowledge of an experienced operator, but to augment their capabilities, amplify their efforts, and give back their most precious resource: time.

The benefits of integrating AI into marketing workflows directly address the tourism sector's most pressing pain points. AI-powered tools can automate the time-consuming and repetitive tasks that consume countless hours—from drafting social media posts and emails to analysing data and scheduling content. This automation allows a small, often overworked team to achieve the output of a much larger one.

More importantly, it frees human staff to focus on the high-value, uniquely human work of delivering the exceptional guest experiences that protect and enhance a brand's reputation, which is critical when the risk of substandard service is so high.

NZ Tourism Marketing AI-Enhanced Masterclass: A 12-Lesson Curriculum

Each of the following twelve lessons is designed as a self-contained module that builds skills sequentially. The curriculum takes a logical path from foundational concepts and high-level strategy through to the practical execution of content creation and advertising, ensuring that operators build a comprehensive and integrated understanding of AI-enhanced marketing.

LESSON ONE: USING AI TO PROMOTE YOUR BUSINESS

This foundational lesson introduces Artificial Intelligence not as a futuristic abstraction, but as a practical tool that offers the immediate opportunity to automate low-value, repetitive work, thereby freeing up operators to focus on high-value activities like strategic planning, business development, and, most importantly, delivering an outstanding guest experience. This lesson frames AI through the concept of the "augmented worker"—a human professional whose skills and efficiency are enhanced by technology, rather than being replaced by it.

Your Custom AI Tool: Tourism PromptCraft Pro

The custom tool for this lesson, Tourism PromptCraft Pro. This interactive trainer teaches you to communicate with AI like a professional. It provides tourism-specific prompt templates, scores your attempts and offers improvements. Master the foundational skill that unlocks every AI tool's potential.

LESSON TWO: EVOLVING YOUR TOURISM MARKETING STRATEGY

In a tourism market characterized by shifting visitor demographics, regulatory uncertainty, and intense competition, a static annual marketing plan is often obsolete before it is even implemented. AI provides the tools for a more dynamic and agile approach to strategy. By analysing vast datasets from market reports, social media trends, and competitor activities, AI can identify emerging patterns and opportunities in time to make plans and take action.

Your Custom AI Tool: Tourism Strategy Weaver

Like having a tourism consultant on speed dial. This AI interviews you about your business, analyses your local market, and co-creates a strategic marketing plan tailored to your unique strengths. Simply answer guided questions about your business goals, challenges, and ideal guests, and receive a professional strategy document that becomes your marketing roadmap.

LESSON THREE: CAPTURING YOUR STORIES

Many tourism operators are natural storytellers in person, able to captivate guests with tales of the land, local legends, and the history of their business. However, translating these spoken narratives into compelling written content for websites, brochures, and social media can be a significant challenge. AI can serve as a powerful assistant in this process, acting as both a scribe and a structural editor. It can help overcome writer's block by generating initial drafts, suggest different angles for a story, and organize scattered thoughts into a coherent and engaging narrative structure, making the content creation process far less intimidating.

Your Custom AI Tool: Authentic Story Weaver

This thoughtful AI partner draws out the stories you carry in your head and heart. It asks insightful questions about your personal journey, local legends, and what makes your place special, then helps organise your thoughts into compelling narratives for your website, brochures, and social media.

LESSON FOUR: UNDERSTANDING YOUR POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS

Effective marketing begins with a deep understanding of the customer. According to Brandon Lake, founder of RESMARK and co-founder of tour companies: “Everything starts with the right person. Before using AI to write, copy or generate blog posts, you need to feed it the right foundation: your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)... We’re not guessing. We’re mining reviews, Google Analytics, product files, real insights to build a real profile. If you skip this part, everything downstream, your copy, your ads, your website... will miss the mark.”

AI offers unprecedented capabilities for developing this understanding by analysing vast amounts of data from diverse sources—such as booking patterns, website analytics, social media interactions, and online reviews—to identify significant patterns in customer demographics, behaviours, and preferences. This analysis allows operators to move beyond vague notions of their target market and create highly detailed Ideal Customer Profiles. Furthermore, AI can pinpoint the specific wants, needs and "pain points," thr challenges and frustrations, that these customers face when planning or undertaking travel, enabling the creation of marketing messages that are precisely targeted and highly resonant.

Your Custom AI Tool: ICP & Wants, Needs, Pain Points Analysis

The process of market research and customer profiling can be complex and time-consuming. The ICP & Wants, Needs, Pain Points Analysis tool is designed to streamline this critical task. It provides a structured, guided framework that helps operators define their ICPs and systematically uncover their corresponding wants, needs and pain points. By asking targeted questions and analysing inputs, the tool ensures that operators develop a clear, data-informed picture of who they are trying to reach, what prospects want and need and what problems their tourism offering genuinely solves for them. This precision in targeting is fundamental to efficient marketing, leading to better allocation of resources, higher conversion rates, and a greater return on investment.

LESSON FIVE: CUSTOMER WANTS, NEEDS & PAIN POINTS

Identifying a customer's wants, needs and pain points is only the first step; the crucial next stage is to clearly articulate how your business delivers the desired results. AI can be an invaluable creative partner in this process. It can help bridge the gap between an identified customer frustration and a business's offerings by generating novel ideas and specific language for how products or services directly address these issues. This ensures that marketing messages are not just descriptive but are framed as persuasive, problem-solution narratives that resonate deeply with the potential customer's needs.

Your Custom AI Tool: Insights Generator

The Insights Generator tool takes the raw data of customer wants, needs and pain points (identified in the previous lesson) and helps transform it into actionable marketing insights. Its purpose is to help operators move beyond simply listing features and instead articulate the compelling benefits and value their offerings provide. The tool can prompt the operator to think about their services in a new light, helping them craft powerful value propositions that clearly communicate the relief, joy or satisfaction a customer will experience. This ensures that all marketing content is focused on the "what's in it for me" factor, which is the key to persuasion and conversion.

LESSON SIX: EVALUATING YOUR WEBSITE

A tourism operator's website is their most important digital asset—it is their virtual storefront, brochure, and booking agent all in one. However, many of the technical factors that determine a website's success, such as loading speed, mobile usability, and search engine health, are invisible and difficult for a non-expert to diagnose. AI-powered website auditing tools can rapidly and comprehensively analyse these critical technical aspects. They can scan a site in minutes and produce a detailed report that identifies and prioritizes issues, allowing operators to focus their attention on the fixes that will have the greatest impact on user experience and search engine ranking, all without needing deep technical expertise.

Your Custom AI Tool: AI Site Auditor

The AI Site Auditor tool provides the kind of instant, expert-level website analysis that would typically require hiring an expensive digital agency or consultant. By simply entering a website URL, an operator receives a comprehensive audit covering the most important performance metrics. The key value of this tool lies in its output: a clear, prioritized action list that translates complex technical jargon into understandable, actionable steps. This empowers operators to either make the improvements themselves or have a more informed conversation with their web developer. The inclusion of before-and-after scoring provides tangible proof of progress, creating a motivating feedback loop for continuous optimization.

LESSON SEVEN: OPTIMISING REVIEWS

Online reviews are a cornerstone of the modern travel industry, acting as powerful social proof that heavily influences booking decisions. Managing these reviews effectively—responding promptly, professionally, and consistently—is a critical but time-consuming task. AI can significantly streamline this process. AI tools can analyse the sentiment of reviews to help prioritize responses, identify recurring themes in feedback (e.g., frequent praise for a specific guide, or common complaints about check-in), and generate draft responses that are appropriate in tone and content. This ensures that every piece of feedback is handled strategically, helping to enhance the business's online reputation, build customer trust, and turn feedback into actionable business intelligence.

Your Custom AI Tool: Review Response Master

The Review Response Master tool is designed to empower operators to handle all types of online feedback with confidence and professionalism, especially in challenging situations. Responding to a negative review can be stressful, and it is easy to become defensive. This tool acts as a calm, strategic advisor. By analysing the review, it provides tailored response suggestions that match the operator's established brand voice while addressing the customer's specific concerns. It provides templates and guidance for every scenario, from glowing praise to pointed criticism. This saves significant time, reduces stress, and ensures that every response is a brand-building opportunity, potentially transforming a negative experience into a demonstration of outstanding customer service.

LESSON EIGHT: BRAINSTORMING

Creative fatigue is a real challenge for any business owner responsible for their own marketing. Coming up with a constant stream of fresh, engaging content ideas can be exhausting. AI can serve as an inexhaustible brainstorming partner, capable of generating a vast multitude of ideas based on a few specific inputs. It can help operators break through creative blocks by suggesting diverse angles, exploring different content formats, and identifying novel opportunities related to their customer profiles, pain points, and business insights. This leads to a richer, more varied, and more strategic content pipeline.

Your Custom AI Tool: Idea Generator

The Idea Generator tool is a powerful antidote to the "blank page" problem. Its key advantage is that it does not generate ideas in a vacuum. By leveraging the previously defined customer pain points and business insights as its starting point, it ensures that the generated ideas are not just random, but are strategically relevant and customer-centric. An operator can input a pain point like "fear of bad weather ruining a holiday," and the tool can generate a list of content ideas like "Our Top 10 Rainy Day Activities in Rotorua," "Why Spring is the Secretly Best Time to Visit Fiordland," or a video showcasing the cozy fireplace and board games at their lodge. This saves significant time in the ideation phase and ensures that every piece of content created has a clear purpose and a target audience in mind.

LESSON NINE: CREATING CONTENT CALENDARS

Consistency is a key driver of success in content marketing. A regular flow of valuable and engaging content keeps a brand top-of-mind, builds an audience, and signals to search engines that the website is active and relevant. However, the planning and ideation required to maintain this consistency can be a major drain on an operator's time. AI can act as a strategic content planner. It can take the content ideas generated in Lesson Eight, analyse industry trends, identify popular topics related to a business's niche, and suggest a variety of content ideas tailored to specific target audiences and business goals. It can then help structure these ideas into a logical content calendar, ensuring a steady stream of material across different platforms and saving countless hours in planning and brainstorming.

Your Custom AI Tool: Content Calendar Creator

The Content Calendar Creator automates the often-tedious process of content planning from start to finish. This tool goes beyond simple scheduling by generating customized monthly calendars that are strategically aligned with an operator's specific products, services, and Ideal Customer Profiles. For example, for an operator wanting to boost shoulder-season bookings, the tool could generate a calendar for August filled with content ideas themed around "Spring Awakening in Hawke's Bay." This ensures a strategic, goal-oriented approach to content, preventing the last-minute scramble to find something to post and promoting the kind of consistency that is essential for building audience engagement and improving SEO performance over time.

LESSON TEN: WRITING ARTICLES

Creating high-quality, long-form content like blog articles is one of the most effective ways to establish expertise, build trust, and improve search engine rankings. However, it is also one of the most time-consuming marketing tasks. AI can dramatically accelerate the article writing process. It can generate detailed outlines based on the topics suggested in Lessons Eight and Nine (or your own ideas), draft entire sections of text, suggest relevant keywords, and help optimize the content for both Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and AI Ask Engine Optimization (AEO). This empowers operators, even those who are not confident writers, to consistently produce the kind of rich, authoritative content that attracts organic traffic and provides comprehensive value to readers.

Your Custom AI Tool: AI Article Writer

The AI Article Writer tool is designed to transform a simple content idea into a polished, optimized, long-form article with remarkable speed and efficiency. Its primary benefit is its ability to handle the entire drafting process, ensuring that the resulting article is not only well-written but also strategically structured for maximum visibility in search engines. The tool is programmed to understand the principles of SEO and AEO, building in elements like logical heading structures and direct answers to common user queries. This empowers operators to become publishers of high-quality, authoritative content that drives organic website traffic, establishes their credibility, and ultimately, aims to convert readers into customers.

LESSON ELEVEN: CREATING SOCIAL POSTS

Maintaining a dynamic and engaging presence on social media requires a constant flow of fresh content tailored to different platforms and audiences. AI can be a powerful creative engine for social media marketing. It can generate a wide variety of post captions, from short and punchy to more descriptive and story-driven. It can also suggest relevant and trending hashtags to increase discoverability and even help conceptualize or generate visuals. This allows an operator to maintain a consistent and high-quality social media presence that captures attention in a crowded feed, all while significantly reducing the time and creative energy required.

Your Custom AI Tool: Smart Social Post Generator

The Smart Social Post Generator is a game-changer for the day-to-day reality of social media marketing. Its purpose is to enable operators to quickly and easily create "scroll-stopping" posts that resonate with their target audience. The tool goes beyond simple text generation by helping to conceptualize the entire post, either based on the content ideas already created using the above tools or based on other topics you provide—the hook, the core message, the call to action, and the visual element—ensuring that all components work together to grab attention and drive engagement. By automating much of the creative process, this tool saves immense time and boosts the overall effectiveness of an operator's social media campaigns, helping to translate likes and shares into tangible interest and bookings.

LESSON TWELVE: CREATING ADS

Paid digital advertising offers the ability to reach specific audiences with immediate and targeted messages. However, creating and managing effective ad campaigns can be complex and expensive, with a steep learning curve. AI is revolutionizing this space by making sophisticated advertising techniques accessible to SMEs. AI algorithms can analyse vast amounts of performance data to optimize ad targeting, automatically test different ad variations (A/B testing) to see what resonates most, help craft highly persuasive ad copy, and suggest optimal budget allocations. This leads to more cost-effective campaigns, a higher return on ad spend (ROAS), and less wasted money.

Your Custom AI Tool: Smart Ad Creator

The Smart Ad Creator tool is designed to demystify the world of online advertising for tourism operators. It acts as a virtual ad agency, providing complete, ready-to-launch campaigns for major platforms like Google and Facebook. By inputting business details, campaign goals, and the target audience, an operator receives a full suite of optimized ad components, including multiple headlines, engaging descriptions, and precise audience targeting suggestions, all specifically tailored for the tourism industry. This empowers operators to run professional, effective ad campaigns without needing extensive prior experience or the budget to hire a specialist, allowing them to directly drive bookings and revenue.

Conclusion: Your Roadmap to an AI-Enhanced Future

This course provides a comprehensive, 12-step framework designed to guide New Zealand tourism operators on a transformative journey. By progressing through the lessons, operators move from foundational principles to advanced execution, creating a cohesive and powerful AI-enhanced marketing system. This journey builds a virtuous cycle: a clear, data-informed strategy informs the creation of authentic stories; these stories fuel a pipeline of targeted content; this content is then optimized for discovery and conversion across websites, social media, and paid advertising. At every stage, Artificial Intelligence acts as a powerful co-pilot, making the entire process faster, more efficient, and more effective.

The goal of AI adoption is not to replace the invaluable experience and human touch that define great hospitality. Instead, it is to delegate the repetitive, time-consuming, and data-heavy tasks to the machine. This strategic delegation frees the operator—the human expert—to focus on what they do best: innovating, building relationships, and creating the unforgettable guest experiences that form the heart of the tourism industry. In the context of the sector's current workforce crisis, this is not just a matter of efficiency; it is a crucial strategy for business resilience and for protecting the quality of the "Destination New Zealand" brand.

The path to successful AI adoption is a marathon, not a sprint. The most effective approach is to start small, choose one or two areas from this course to implement first, build confidence and momentum, and then progressively integrate more tools and techniques over time.

TIMING

This course begins on Thursday 11 September.

INVESTMENT

This comprehensive NZ Tourism Marketing AI-Enhanced Masterclass is available for $997+GST. However we offer a $100 Early Bird Discount for bookings received and payment made by Thursday 4 September. Pay only $897+GST for this course!

Bookings are confirmed on receipt of payment, which can be by bank deposit or credit card. We can raise an invoice in advance if you need it.

To reserve your place in this course, please click here to enrol:

If you require an invoice in advance, or prefer to pay by bank deposit, please send an email to info@netmarketingcourses.co.nz with your requirements.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

You’ll receive our emailed confirmation of your booking. Then on the first day of the course we’ll follow up with details of your Login and Password, along with an Enrolment Key for the NZ Tourism Marketing AI-Enhanced Masterclass online training course.

If you have any questions, or would like more information, please email us at info@netmarketingcourses.co.nz

Your instructor for this course is Michael Carney, one of New Zealand’s most experienced digital marketing practitioners and educators. As the founder and director of Netmarketing Courses, Michael has dedicated the last fifteen years to researching, creating, and delivering practical, relevant online training designed specifically for the Aotearoa market. His mission is to empower Kiwi organisations and marketers with the skills they need to thrive in a competitive digital landscape. To date, he has trained over 3,000 students through partnerships with leading industry bodies including the NZ Marketing Association, NZ Retailers Association, Tourism Industry Association NZ, and Hospitality NZ.

Course participants range from absolute beginners just starting to come to grips with digital marketing through to senior marketing professionals looking for Continuing Professional Development and seeking to stay up-to-date with the latest changes in the ever-evolving digital environment. Specific courses are offered for organisations of all sizes, from solopreneurs and small businesses through to local and central government bodies and large corporate businesses.

Michael has practical, hands-on experience with all aspects of digital marketing, from website creation to social media advertising, from strategic guidance and trend analysis to thought leadership. He has been online since 1987 and involved with digital marketing in all its aspects since the mid-1990s. He was an early adopter of Generative AI when ChatGPT launched in late 2022, and now has extensive experience with using AI for research, brainstorming, content creation, design, video creation and editing and what's become known as "vibe coding", using AI to develop web applications.

Michael’s expertise is built on a career spanning more than four decades, during which he has developed marketing and advertising strategies for many of New Zealand's most iconic brands. His extensive client list includes The Warehouse, ANZ Bank, Lion Breweries, Griffins Foods, Sony New Zealand, Honda New Zealand, and Heinz Wattie. This deep, hands-on experience at the highest levels of the industry ensures that every course is grounded in real-world application, not just academic theory. He has held senior strategic roles in major advertising agencies, including National Media Director at HKM Advertising and Strategic Planning Director for The Media Counsel. He currently also is Digital and Strategic Director of the creative agency Good Gravy. 

Beyond his client work, Michael is a respected thought leader, published author, and industry contributor. He wrote the bestselling book "Trade Me Success Secrets," which sold out its first printing in just six weeks, and has ghost-written several other business books on topics like digital transformation. For years, he chaired the Network of Digital Marketers for the NZ Marketing Association and he has been a regular magazine columnist for Marketing Magazine and other titles. This unique combination of in-the-trenches experience, proven teaching ability, and strategic insight makes him the ideal guide to help you master digital marketing.

Feedback from previous digital marketing training course and workshop participants:

• It is great that we have managed to get an external perspective on marketing in the digital space – your expertise in this area is greatly appreciated. – Hazel T.
• I really enjoyed the [Digital Marketing Workshop] today and got a lot out of it  – Nikki H.
• Thanks for a great [Digital Marketing] session yesterday, really enjoyed it and learnt lots – Izi W
• “this was the best professional development course I have done in many years” – Mark R, senior Agency Exec responsible for social media
• “thought the information within was outstanding” – Ed P, General Manager
• “What I loved was that I started with a fairly rudimentary understanding of social media but have learned a lot – including where to find more information as I need it.” – Fiona W, Marketing Manager
• “I found it relevant, informative, topical, insightful and a bloody good read. It’s never evangelical, too techy, patronising, assumes that you know too much or too little about digital and has a warm sense of humour in the communication throughout which helped faciliate the learning process for me.” — Adrienne B, new media senior executive
• “Thanks for pointing me in the direction of this course! It’s been extremely enlightening” — Shayne P, design agency director
• “Rapt with what I have seen of the course” — Julia R, fashion editor
• “I’m really enjoying the course – learning a lot – and I know the two friends I persuaded to join us are also loving it.” — Lavinia C, designer
• “Am thoroughly enjoying the content!” – Kara B, magazine co-ordinator
• “I was already engaging with social media and have been doing so for about 6 years or so. But, did I know how to use social media in a marketing and business sense? No, I simply did not. This course was a great way to show me how to do that.” — Sheryl K, online marketer