Tourism businesses can no longer ignore Kiwis

I’ve been lucky enough to spend the last few days pootling around the McKenzie Country and Central Otago in my old Ford Capri.

The Capri hadn’t been fired up in anger for three months and the thermostat is a bit knackered, so it was running on the hot side. So as well as keeping my eyes on the speedo and rev dials, the temperature gauge got my full attention as I headed south.

Christchurch to Queenstown used to be the mother road for tourism in the South Island. It was also a very ecumenical road, with tourists of most nationalities on the same route, whether it was on coaches or self-driving. Fly into Christchurch, check out the garden city then head south via Geraldine for the surreal colours of Tekapo and then the remarkable beauty of Queenstown.

But the mother road has got a lot more blurry since we got hit by the pandemic mother lode last year.

International visitors dried up overnight, to be replaced by domestic visitors like you and me. It’s been a wake-up call for the sector. No longer can any tourismdependent business afford to continue to ignore Kiwis.

Unsurprisingly, locals have a different take on destinations and timing. Whereas the global tourism tidal wave of the last 10 years has

been both seasonal and centralised around a handful of locations, locals have a different dynamic. We’re a lot less seasonal and a lot more provincial. So places more off the beaten track are doing a lot better.

Just check out the Vulcan Tavern at St Bathans or the Lantern Motel in Reefton, which are chocka with domestic tourists and sometimes struggling to deal with demand.

Locals also are happy to bypass the big global booking engines like expedia and booking.com, instead preferring to pick up the phone and talk to the proprietor. Dealing direct results in more money for the local economy and often a better deal for the consumer.

A lot of people are saying ‘‘it’s all new’’ from a tourism marketing perspective. But they are forgetting that Kiwis have always been the largest segment, making up close to 60 per cent before Covid-19.

We also need a lot more experiential product in the regions to engage with and delight domestic visitors. These are experiences that are unique to the region, but also scalable and sustainable until the global routes reopen.

Some regions are doing this already, like I saw in South Canterbury and its new ‘‘roam’’ touring route.

Roam (rivers, ocean, astro, mountains) is a touring loop that goes from Timaru up through the Waitaki Valley, then through the heart of the Mackenzie from Omarama to Mt John and Tekapo, before going past the killer pies of the Fairlie Bakehouse and the Opihi catchment back to Timaru.

And as with the roam loop, it will also nourish the local businesses around it.

Agility is a buzzword that annoys the heck out of me, but it’s what tourism operators need to have at the moment. It’s like they have three big dials in front of them.

Dial one is putting together product, price, place packages for domestic tourists and doing it in a way that embraces locals’ propensity to be provincial and nonseasonal (and in particular meeting the ‘‘short break’’ appetite of Kiwis).

Dial two is accessing sufficient labour to scale up to meet local demand, scaling made harder by MIQ, overseas lockdowns and visa issues. This means being innovative on who you hit up and how you train them. Immigration New Zealand needs to come to the party on this.

Dial three is the global picture for those that can afford to. This means keeping a residual profile in the global market so that when it’s time to spin up your global marketing spend you are not doing it off a zero base. Because we won’t be marketing into a vacuum.

A bit like driving my old Capri, tourism operators need to be constantly monitoring all three dials at the moment as they try to see what’s coming around the corner.