You may recall a short while back how a Queensland Australia tourism bureau ran a contest titled “The Best Job in the World” in order to generate travel interest to the islands in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

It sounded like a rough gig: get paid $110,000 to live in a beach house on a gorgeous island and maintain a weekly blog. (I, meanwhile, live in a rented townhouse near Mercer Island. Poo.)

Not exactly the same…

The winner was chosen out of 34,000 applicants and is keeping a blog about his experience as the island caretaker, and the contest itself won numerous marketing awards.

Now Thailand is jumping on the travel contest bandwagon, offering free trips to five couples who will blog and tweet about their experiences and vie for a chance to win a grand prize of $10,000, a Blackberry and a camcorder. They’re looking for Internet savvy people with a good grasp of social media and various websites (YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, etc). Thailand’s tourism industry has taken a bit of a nosedive due to political upheaval and the current recession, which is why they’ve decided to run this contest. Lots of videos have already been submitted to their contest website, and they’re continuing to accept submissions until September 15th.

Both of these marketing campaigns are very smartly using the Internet and social media to increase tourism for a relatively small amount of money. The Queensland Australia campaign cost about $1.2 million, but it’s attracted about $100 million of media coverage and brought nearly 7 million visitors and 48 million page views to the site. The amount of attention and buzz attracted by the campaign will likely lead to an increase in tourism to the area, which should easily pay for the marketing costs and contest fees. Likewise, the Thailand contest is probably being run for less than a million dollars and will generate tons of coverage about the contest and from the contest winners as they blog and share their experience.

This is the power of user generated content. Oftentimes people just want to hear about an average person’s experience, not some celebrity who can afford private jets and five star hotels and villas. It’s interesting to read what real people have to say about a destination, a hotel, a restaurant, etc, and the establishment benefits from free publicity and marketing.

Obviously there are some downsides to UGC — it would suck if the island caretaker got eaten by a shark or if the Thailand trip winners contracted terrible food poisoning and were sidelined with Montezuma’s Revenge for the entire trip. However, winning a contest and posting about your experience is probably different than going to a restaurant and reviewing it on Yelp. The contest winners are probably going to be a bit more diplomatic and positive considering they’re getting a free ride to an exotic locale than someone who wants to bitch about an undercooked burger they got at the local Applebee’s.

Sad burger is sad.

I bet we’ll continue to see travel contests of this nature, and I think it’s great. It gives Internet nerds like myself a chance at traveling to places and having an experience we might not necessarily be able to afford, and it opens up the tourism to a relatively untapped/underutilized market. These campaigns make traveling seem more accessible than ever before, and with the increasing adoption of social media, it spreads the messaging to far reaching audiences through more and more media.

I’d totally be up for traveling on a tourism board’s dime in exchange for promotion and recaps, as I’m sure tons of other people would be too. Who wouldn’t want to blog, tweet, YouTube, Flickr and Facebook the shit out of their experience if it means a free trip to Tahiti or Egypt or any of the other couple hundred countries you can travel to? Think about it…

I keed, I keed