This research illustrates New Zealand’s online marketing strategy with respect to the potential Chinese youth market. The research aims to analyse the impact of New Zealand’s online strategies on the Chinese youth market’s decision making in relation to travelling to New Zealand. The researcher with this topic through the background of the rapid development of New Zealand’s tourism industry in recent years, with a large number of Chinese tourists choosing New Zealand as their destination. Also, with the development of Web 2.0 in the 21st century, online applications have significantly changed not only tourist organisations’ marketing strategies and but also tourists’ travel behaviour. Tourist organisations worldwide take advantage of online strategies as tools to promote destinations. Travellers are also starting to adopt online applications during the periods of pre-trip, during-trip, and post-trip. The youth market is actively involved in this process because they are more familiar with online applications. As a result, the researcher designed this topic to analyse how the New Zealand tourism industry’s online strategies affect the potential Chinese youth market’s decision making, and to examine the usefulness of the New Zealand tourism industry’s online marketing strategies to the potential Chinese youth market. At the end, this research is expected to contribute to the New Zealand tourism industry with more effective online marketing strategies for the potential Chinese youth market.

The research conducted a quantitative study undertaken in one of China’s biggest cities, Dalian. The city of Dalian was chosen because it is the researcher’s hometown, which is more convenient for the data collection process. Two hundred questionnaires were obtained during the period of 10th April to 8th May 2017. The sample was selected in the age group of 20-35, and it is divided into three groups for the research. Descriptive analysis, cross-tabulation, one-way ANOVA tests and chi-square were adopted for the analysis after the data collection.

The results show that the age group of 25-29 is more likely to be interested in travelling to New Zealand. Young Chinese tourists are more educated and experienced travellers. Most young Chinese tourists aged 20-30 are employed by others and earn lower incomes, while the respondents in the age group of 30-35 earn higher incomes. Also, the results indicate that respondents consider families and friends as their most trustworthy reference groups.

The results show that age and employment status can affect the frequency with which the respondents use social media websites and how trustworthy they consider the social media websites to be. But age and employment status cannot affect how useful they consider the social media websites to be. Then, different age groups can influence which social media sites are the most important for the respondents. All age groups agree that Weibo is the most important social media site. And then, most of the respondents will choose a mixed pattern for their trips but the group whose income is over 20,000 RMB would like to travel by FIT.