Paris Tourism Festival attracts French tourists

Cook Islands Tourism (CIT) Representative to Southern Europe Nick Costantini hosted an event in Paris earlier this month to raise awareness and educate the tourism industry about the Cook Islands.

The event was hosted by New Zealand Ambassador Caroline Bilkey and her team at the New Zealand Embassy in Paris and included two key sessions.

According to the Cook Islands Tourism Board, the board held a lunchtime training session with eight of France’s leading travel wholesalers.

“The meeting included senior Air Tahiti staff who wanted to collaborate on promoting the Papeete-Rarotonga route to French tourists, either as an extension of a holiday to Tahiti or as a standalone destination.”

That evening, the tourism board partnered with leading French travel agency ASIA VOYAGE and Singapore Airlines to promote the destination to 30 of the top-selling retailers in the Paris area.

“We are delighted to have found this opportunity to showcase our destination with such a prestigious partner. The high quality participants and support provided by the New Zealand Embassy and our partners will be invaluable in raising awareness and increasing the number of French tourists visiting Rarotonga and Paenua,” Constantini said.

“Feedback from the event has been very helpful in identifying our target audience, with repeat customers in the South Pacific and long-haul travel from New Zealand being our main areas of focus. The invaluable support of our local representative and consultant Ludivine Buyer will ensure our efforts in this market pay off.”

The Ministry of Tourism said the event was well attended and well responded to by industry media, with several media articles published positioning the Cook Islands as a new South Pacific frontier destination.

The Tourism Board is currently in talks with local airlines to invite a top journalist from a prominent French travel magazine to the Cook Islands to support an ongoing consumer outreach campaign.

In her welcome address, Ambassador Caroline Bilkey recalled not only New Zealand’s links with the Cook Islands, but also those between the Cook Islands and France.

During World War I, three soldiers from the Cook Islands worked with New Zealand tunnel boring machines to dig the Arras Underpass for the Allied offensive in 1917. One of the soldiers left behind a conch (shell) that was found in a Wellington quarry nearly a century later and inspired the design of the Pacific Memorial at Wellington’s Pukeahu National War Memorial Park.

These soldiers were among 43 members of the Maori Pioneer Battalion sent to Arras, France, to assist the New Zealand Tunnel Company during World War I (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918). Tunnel workers excavated caves beneath the city of Arras in preparation for a 12-mile tunnel on the eve of the Battle of Arras in 1917.