Economic Sustainability

What It Looks Like:

Tourism delivers opportunity and prosperity across the New Zealand economy.

Business Commitments

The Economic Commitments reflect three key aspects that contribute to business success – resilience, investment and innovation.

1. Resilience: Focus on long-term business performance and resilience.

2. Investment: Invest to create value, opportunities and to drive sustainability practices.

3. Innovation: Innovate to solve problems, create new ways to do things and increase productivity.

Remember - to develop your Sustainability Plan download the Tourism-sustainability-action-plan-2020 (word template) if you haven't already, go through the actions for each commitment, figure out where you would like to start and make a plan!

1. Resilience

This commitment is about having a focus on long term business performance and resilience.

Actions to help get you started:

Start by ensuring you are set up to operate your business based on sound business practices and good ethics. The Association has a number of avenues to guide you on these including:

Create a business plan (if you don't have one) - The Association has a business plan template with links to other useful information.

Ministry of Business Innovation & Employment (MBIE) also have some great resources around financial planning; business planning; staff contracts; etc.

2. Investment

This Commitment is about investing to create value, opportunities and to drive sustainable practices.

Actions to help get you started:

Start by ensuring you have plans in place to prudently manage and safeguard all your financial assets. This includes your intangible and current assets such as your relationships with agents and local suppliers; your brand; website, etc.
Regularly review your fixed assets as part of your budget and business plan process. Your fixed assets include things such as your property and room furnishings.
When investigating future purchases consider investing in environmentally friendly technology where and when appropriate. Some suggestions are:

solar power, photovoltaic panels (rented or purchased and check local government payment schemes), EV vehicles, EV charging stations for guests.

3. Productivity / Revenue

This Commitment is about innovating to solve problems, create new ways to do things and increase your guest nights.

Actions to help get you started:

Start by ensuring you have strategies in place to increase productivity / guest nights such as:

Working with other local members to refer guests. Get to know other Association members and their properties so that you can be confident in recommending guests to other properties.
Work with your local Regional Tourism Office to help encourage domestic and international guests including in the shoulder and off peak seasons.
Regularly review other properties, price and market reviews. A regular scan of the market can provide a useful insight into how you may be able to improve your property and attract and retain guests.
Develop plans to attract domestic and international visitors to address issues around seasonality and fill gaps (see business plan template above)
Capture data about your visitors - ensure your reservation system can generate appropriate reports and keep up to date with guest reviews on all your booking platforms.

Want to do more?

Tourism Sustainability Commitment has further suggestions, help and support to encourage you to extend your Economic Commitment.

Have suggestions for our members?

We'd love to hear them! Email our Association Secretary so she can share your suggestions with our members.