The issue facing many travellers in New Zealand, when seeking to visit artists in their studios or galleries is that contact details are spread over numerous websites and often buried deep in the Internet.

Aotearoa Artist Trail has been established to resolve this issue and make it easy for travellers to connect with artists in New Zealand. This is being achieved via a website which will eventually bring together a network of 15 regional artist trails.

Each artist trail will have an artist directory, indexed by genre and within each directory will be a free basic listing for every artist in New Zealand.

John Coxon, founder of Aotearoa Artist Trail said, "the idea of a national artist trail emerged from my involvement in helping to form the New Zealand Jade Artist Society Inc. When we went looking for details of jade carvers online, it was a really time consuming exercise. The thought occured to me that we could make it easier for people find artists and we've gone ahead and made it happen."

At present Aotearoa Artist Trail has three regional artist trails on its website, for Auckland, Canterbury and the West Coast. Five more regional artist trails will be online at the end of January and a further eight are scheduled for the end of February.

The website also contains artist profiles, lots of images of New Zealand art and opportunties for artists, galleries or other tourism related businesses to advertise. The website contains a blog which is updated a couple of times each week and is supported by social media marketing that is updated on a daily basis. When asked how artists might obtain a listing in the directory, John Coxon said, "its really easy, the best way is to simply email us with name, description of art, address, telephone number, website and email detail. It costs nothing and we will create the listing for you."

Artist may also submit high quality images of art for display on the front page of the website and in some of the internal pages. Information on events and exhibitions may be emailed to Aotearoa Artist Trail and they will be added to their Facebook page, their blog and promoted via Twitter.