Background

Tourism is Northland's second-biggest income earner. The industry employs one in nine Northlanders and brings more than $540 million into the region each year.

Northland enjoys 1.7 million visitor nights annually and there are more than 1300 tourism operators in Northland

Tourism Development Group

This group was established to ensure engagement of key industry and government stakeholders to oversee implementation of the regional visitor strategy. This group of about 20 members is chaired by Albert Lovell and meets on a quarterly basis. It has partially acted as a voice of industry, however as it includes local and central government representatives there needs to be further work on establishing a strongly mandated industry lobbying mechanism for tourism issues. The TDG is tasked with driving many of the actions in the strategy but there is a question over the degree to which private operators can continue diverting their focus from their own businesses to contributing time to these projects.

The Northland Visitor Strategy 2008-2013

The strategy has been developed by Enterprise Northland and the Northland Tourism Development Group. It provides an update on the region's first Northland Tourism Strategy 2003-2008.

	Wreck diving in Northland

The primary goal for this strategy, for the industry and for Destination Northland, is to grow tourism demand and expenditure from the 2006 base of $657.6 million, especially in the shoulder seasons. This will enhance profitability for the tourism industry, creating a stronger commercial rating base for local government, enabling both sectors to increase investment in environmental sustainability initiatives, infrastructure and better quality services. It will also create benefits for the local community in employment and community facilities that would not be justifiable without additional tourism demand.

With a primary focus on Destination Marketing, Destination Northland is a key champion and implementer of many of the proposed actions in this plan. However, this is intended to be a comprehensive destination management plan with many recommendations that can only be acted upon by other parties. As such, success will rely upon joint ownership across the full range of stakeholders and a concerted effort to maintain cross-agency communication and coordination.

	Maori carving - Waitangi National Trust

Overall, this strategy aims to maintain momentum on the high level of success in implementing the initial 2003 plan which was strongly aligned to the NZ Tourism Strategy 2010. Likewise, this new Northland Visitor Strategy has conscious linkages with the updated NZ Tourism Strategy 2015 and the tourism issues that have arisen or become accentuated over the last five years, including increased fuel costs, consumer concern over carbon emissions and marketing in the Web 2.0 environment.

Many of the achievements to date have been supported by New Zealand Trade & Enterprise (NZTE) Major Regional Initiative funding which has now ceased. This has implications for capacity to implement many new intended initiatives. It is also important to acknowledge areas where there remains a level of frustration or lack of progress on the original Northland Tourism Strategy. These include securing competitive funding for Destination Northland, establishing a significant domestic campaign, major regional event development, i-SITE coordination and comprehensive broadband coverage.

A new approach has been taken with a simple framework of three priority headings to promote simple communication of the strategy to stakeholders.

•  Brand – The regional branding will be refined to provide a stronger differentiated proposition, inspiring visitors to come for life-changing experiences. The brand values will be consistently applied to develop and market the region to visitors and will align strongly with Tourism New Zealand 's Youngest Country on Earth and 100% Pure NZ positioning.

•  Living the Destination – This is about sustainably delivering a quality tourism experience for visitors and the communities hosting them. Northland's communities in the widest sense must be engaged through a value of tourism stakeholder communications plan in order to deliver on the brand promise. This also encompasses sustainably managing the destination for growth including the environment, Maori tourism development, infrastructure, product development, i-SITEs, profitability, training and professional development, visitor facilities and service quality. Living the Destination is underpinned by the Maori principles of kaitiakitanga and manaakitanga.

•  Targeted Marketing – An increased share of the region's finite marketing resources will go into the emerging economic triangle of Auckland /Waikato/ Bay of Plenty, followed by Australia . These are Northland's “banker” markets with the most potential to boost shoulder season tourism spend. Some activity in other core markets including USA , UK and Europe will be sustained, with one off opportunities assessed as they arise. A watching brief will be maintained on markets like China and India which as yet are not significant for Northland but do have longer term potential to generate off season business. Northland's Web 2.0 marketing will also continue to be boosted to address social networking, build multi-media content, expand translated material and facilitate live searching, booking, and transacting of Northland tourism experiences. There will also be a concerted effort to strengthen strategic partnerships with Auckland , potentially including jointly resourced sales staff, Australian campaigns and more i-SITE presence.

Rather than ring-fencing strategies for sustainability and seasonality, these two concepts are taken as top priority policies to underpin the whole plan. Every initiative must be held up against a vision and criteria for sustainability in all its meanings. Similarly, every effort must be made to ensure that branding, product development and marketing initiatives serve to build the shoulder season.