Tourism Queensland has declared the success of its latest campaign went “way beyond its expectations”.

On Monday, the tourist board unveiled its “island caretaker vacancy” campaign to recruit one person to live on Hamilton Island for six months – and receive a salary of £70,000.

The job description included feeding turtles, collecting the mail and cleaning the pool.

The vacancy attracted massive media attention, causing the islandreefjob.com website to crash. Jane Nicholson, the board’s UK regional director, said the site was being upgraded.

By Wednesday, the website had received 500,000 hits and 350 applicants – including one from the Vatican City.

Applicants must upload 60-second videos of themselves onto its islandreefjob.com website.
 
“It’s been keeping us busy,” Nicholson said. “We’ve been working through the night to upgrade the website, so applicants should not give up.”

The idea was conceived 12 months ago in the Brisbane office, Nichols said, and aimed to put “Queensland in the spot light”.

“We wanted an idea to promote all of the islands - around the Great Barrier Reef there are 900 of them. We wanted to promote these so they can compete on the world stage. The campaign’s been phenomenal. It’s just so strong and it has really reached out to people.”

The board used Australian ad agency XCOM Media to help develop the campaign. Its director, Rob Bell, told TTG: “We have a long standing relationships with some of Australia’s largest travel companies, including Flight Centre, and we see them as strong digital marketers who always look to innovate and be progressive with what they do.”

Another ad agency, Cummins Nitro, set up the website, hosting and application processing.

Qantas Holidays reacted quickly to the media interest, releasing special five nights for the price of four deals to Hamilton.

Applications close on February 22, 2009.

For more details, read Matt Parsons' travel industry blog