History-making Extraordinary Taxi Ride wraps-up in Broome

Western Australia's Extraordinary Taxi today drove into Broome - the final destination on its groundbreaking journey across the State.

Tourism Minister Liz Constable said the 10,000 kilometre-plus taxi ride had already attracted significant media interest throughout Australia and the world, paving the way for the next stage of the promotion.

"Although the journey phase of the campaign came to its official end today, the extraordinary images, video and personal experiences collected along the way will continue to be used to market and promote WA in our key markets, domestically and internationally during the next year," Dr Constable said.

"For the past nine weeks, WA's most extraordinary taxi driver, Doug Slater, has led 22 passengers from Australia and around the globe on what we believe is a world-first for any tourism campaign.

"Passengers from WA, the Eastern States and as far afield as Germany, Singapore, Malaysia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom have come to experience the extraordinary and contribute to the success of the campaign."

The Minister said the campaign had already been a resounding success with international and domestic travel partners reporting significant increases in bookings.

"The campaign has many months to go, but already generated media exposure worth more than $2.6million and reached a potential global audience of more than 60 million," she said.

"The Extraordinary Taxi Ride has also had an immediate effect on tourism business with our travel partners reporting double and triple-digit increases in bookings to WA, which they are directly attributing to their involvement in the campaign.

"The campaign website has had more than 160,000 visits, with people spending 15,000 hours following the ride, plus television crews from New Zealand and throughout Australia joined the taxi entourage to follow the journey.

"The taxi ride has been strongly supported in regional WA by hundreds of local operators and, with our international visitor numbers continuing to rise, this campaign will further boost our appeal to visitors around the world."

Along for the Extraordinary Taxi Ride have been many sponsors and major trade partners including Qantas, Travelpoint, Harvey World Travel, Travelscene Amex, Bankwest, TomTom, Skywest, Telstra, Budget, RAC and McInerney Ford, with total support valued at nearly $1.5million.

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