Annie Dundas: Auckland Unlimited Destination Director on North Island tourism organisations teaming up

Tourism organisations from across the North Island are working to put a spotlight on it.  

Fifteen operators have teamed up and signed a Memorandum of Understanding. 

It aims to generate interest from key tourism markets particularly Australia, North America, and China. 

Auckland Unlimited Destination Director Annie Dundas told Mike Hosking both islands have different offerings, so tourism shouldn't be merged as one. 

She says they're getting back to just being the North, and are acknowledging how well the South Island has done. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Another idea to fire up our tourism sector. We had
a group of North Island tour operators joining forces as
a sort of collective. Martin Bridge are the Far North
basically and everything in between. Annie Dundas is the destination
director at Auckland Unlimited and is with us very good morning, Anny.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
Good morning Mike.

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Is segregating a small country into smaller bits a wise
thing to do.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
Well, we've done it for a long time and now
we're kind of getting back to being the northern and
not acknowledging how well the South Island's done and a
lot of the international work they've done. So it just
makes it easier for our international partners to work with us.

Speaker 1 (00:34):
Well, I was going to say, are we sliced so
small that no one knows what's going on? I'm not
trying to be negative here, but I'm just working up
from an international marketing perspective. New Zealand Inc. Is one thing.
Suddenly you're going, well, hang on, you can have the
South Island. Now, you can have a bit of the
North Island. Or wait a minute, if you're in the Northland,
how about Rhoda rural kit.

Speaker 2 (00:51):
You know what I'm saying, yeah, I do, and I
think we've got so much going on here, which is
the track. But what's happened since COVID is things have
can tracted a lot overseas. We've got less partners, they're
all working from home. We've got to get smarter about
how we turn up overseas and us going as the
North Island is kind of an easier proposition for many

(01:11):
of our partners to unpack and sell.

Speaker 1 (01:14):
When you put together a coalition like this of the
North Island, how much due diligent goes in to say,
if I'm going to put you in my North Island package,
you and Kerry Carey are you up to speed? You
and Martin Borough do you know what you're doing? You
and rota Arua are you as good as these other two?
That sort of thing.

Speaker 2 (01:30):
Every single region has a job to do to build
capability within their own region around are they international ready?
So there's a lot of work that goes on from
a tour of the New zeenand level into our local level,
and that's really important as we kind of build operators
and new products and expanses to sell overseas. So I
guess we start with the core, the good you know

(01:51):
the coll stuff, and then obviously we're trying to build
all the time in terms of adding new product.

Speaker 1 (01:55):
I noted in reading about this yesterday there was a
claim that you'd done something similar with Australia to increase
the Australian tourism traffic, which appears in the last year
to have worked. So this is material. You can KPI
this and say it's successful.

Speaker 2 (02:08):
We can. We've kicked off with Rhodaura and Auckland Airport
with a two plus two too easy campaign which went
really well, saw a lovely lift and an Australian arrival
sort of threat of the end OFCED and this is
kind of adding more regions into that kind of max
as well. So yeah, we've got a sort of semi
proven formula and now we're kind of going a bit bigger.

Speaker 1 (02:27):
All power to your arm, hope it to smash hit.
Any Dundas who's with Auckland Unlimited with us this morning
doing the whole North Island. For more from the Mic
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