Collaboration key to showcasing North Island tourism destinations

North Island regions hope a new collaboration will encourage more tourists to explore, stay longer and spend more.

Three airports and 15 North Island regional tourism organisations have banded together to share resources as part of a new Memorandum of Understanding.

The partnership was officially signed at the Auckland Airport Tourism Forum in Rotorua on Monday.

Most of Northland's visitors are domestic, with overseas tourists only accounting for 20-30 percent of visitors, but Northland Inc. head of destination Tania Burt hoped that would change by working with other tourism leaders.

"There's really no reason why we should get more international visitors, so to collaborate with our friends at Auckland Airport and other regions as well, who have strong international visitation, will boost the visibility of Northland."

Burt wanted to see more tourists in Northland year-round, so businesses had more consistency, but promoting a region wasn't easy, when tourism funding was often tight and only getting tighter.

She was pleased the different regions would share their insights and marketing to promote the North Island as a destination.

"When it comes to international marketing, you have to be really smart about where you invest, because people don't have spare marketing dollars lying around. Regional tourism organisation, businesses, even Tourism New Zealand are under constraints."

Collaborating was a way to showcase the regions better and create the positive change they wanted, she said. The potential for the North Island was huge.

"One thing we like to work by is, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together, so it's time for the North Island to go and Northland has to be part of that."

The partnership will initially focus on three key visitor markets - Australia, the US and China.

Later this year, more than 60 tourism operators will meet with Australian travel sellers across the ditch at a North Island showcase.

RotoruaNZ chief executive Andrew Wilson said competing against other overseas destinations for visitors was hard.

"When you go in to a marketplace like Australia, where we're traditionally gone in all independently, we're all fighting for a voice and time with those buyers. Going in collectively, we've got more scale.

"We've got more ability basically to encourage those buyers through the door."

The North Island had a lot of room to grow and the partnership aligned well with the government's push for more tourist boots on the ground, he said. They would save time and money at a time when belts were tightening.

"We've all got to continue to focus in terms of how we do more with less and this is definitely a really strong option in terms of how we do that."

TRENZ - the country's largest tourism business event - kicks off in Rotorua on Tuesday. Rotorua was already buzzing before the event, which was last held in there in 2019.

Wilson said people would be hard pressed to find an available room in town this week, because hotel bookings were so strong, and other businesses were also benefiting from events and more visitors to the area.

"There's a huge amount of business done at TRENZ, which will have an impact obviously for the next three, four, five years in terms of how some of those itineraries are put together."

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