Top Tourism Businesses Named as Award Finalists
06/09/2019
Sustainable growth, better insight, building up the workforce, destination management and climate change are the government and industry’s top priorities for the tourism sector.
The five key issues were announced yesterday at the Tourism Summit Aotearoa in Wellington as joint priority areas following the release earlier in the year of Tourism Industry Aotearoa’s Tourism 2025 Growth Framework and the government’s Tourism Strategy.
TIA chief executive Chris Roberts said the challenge for industry and government was to get ahead of issues affecting the sector.
“The sector and the government must work together to manage the impacts of tourism while sharing the benefits and making sure that they are shared,†he said.
“This is a great challenge to take up because achieving sustainable tourism will boost our economy, create regional prosperity, protect, support and enhance our environment and generally improve NZ’s quality of life and wellbeing.â€
Of the two strategic frameworks, tourism minister Kelvin Davis said: “One activates Government and the other activates industry – bring these together and we can jointly advance the tourism industry for the benefit of New Zealanders.â€
Roberts also revealed that a survey of industry revealed the top five issues of concern this year were: freedom camping, government support, business confidence, sustainability, and the visitor experience.
Freedom camping had been one of the top issues in 2017 but this year it was a different type of issue, said Roberts.
“Two years ago it was what do we do about the occasional inappropriate behaviour by freedom campers, now there’s a concern from the industry that we’ve gone past dealing with the issues of freedom camping to inadvertently promoting it. That comes through very very strongly in the survey.
“There’s been government money and local government efforts and industry efforts as well go into managing the freedom camping issue. Our members, the wider industry, are now telling us that may have gone too far.â€
Roberts added that the survey showed that the tourism industry was generally more optimistic than the wider NZ business community.
“Back in 2017, almost two-thirds of tourism businesses were expecting growth, it dropped a little last year but still over half were expecting growth. It’s fallen again this year but still 43% of respondents expected to grow in the coming year. Compare that to 9% in the wider NZ business community [according to the ANZ’s business confidence survey].â€
However, the survey also showed a decline in perceived support from central government for tourism, despite increased resourcing, with issues such as work and visitor visas, and increasing fees and compliance costs of concern.
