Student tours a niche market for Bay firm

New Zealand Educational Tours' operations director Adele Marsden and managing director Ian Turner focus on international students.

A Tauranga-based tourism company has found a niche in the international student market by providing group holiday tours for overseas students attending schools in New Zealand.

Ian Turner, managing director of New Zealand Educational Tours, said that business growth was being driven by word of mouth among the international agents who arrange for students to attend schools in New Zealand.

"We have more and more agents telling us they've heard about the quality of our tours through the experiences of others and they want to promote us too," said Mr Turner.

"It's that positive word of mouth that can be very powerful when it comes to influencing buying decisions."

Mr Turner said the student tour business was very competitive and he preferred not to publicly disclose names of the agents he worked with, but he provided several written testimonials from clients.

NZET was started in 1991 and Mr Turner and his wife Adele Marsden took over the business in February 2006. Despite challenging economic conditions, including a high NZ dollar and global recession, Mr Turner said NZET had more than doubled the number of student bookings and taken the company's annual turnover from $600,000 in its first year to more than $1.8 million in 2013.

NZET works closely with international agents, who as part of their service make sure their students' school holiday time is covered as well. Most of NZET's tours are for international students aged 14-18 studying in New Zealand high schools and mostly focus on the holidays, with the most popular tours being in the South Island.

The company also caters to visiting overseas school groups and has an Australian company, Aussie Educational Tours, which runs their Australian tours. Mr Turner is also the current chairman of Bay of Plenty Polytechnic.

Ms Marsden, the firm's operations director, previously worked for 15 years in the tourism industry based in London, leading operations for Contiki Tours in Europe and Russia before taking over the helm at its larger sister company, Trafalgar Tours.

"When we first took over NZET we had strong relationships with global exchange organisations like [student exchange organisation] AFS," said Ms Marsden. "But we worked on marketing to fee-paying students and their agents as well, and became the preferred New Zealand operator for some of the larger agents."

The company has a four-person team, including sisters Vanessa Harmens and Dana Lawrence. They draw on a pool of 15 trained tour managers, seven of whom are Tauranga-based.