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HOW DO YOU SEE THE COrOMaNDEl IN 10 YEarS TIME?
Visit
www.thecoromandel.com/beyond2025to read
Beyond 2025
and contribute your thoughts
At the beginning of the year
The Coromandel
was voted New Zealand’s number one holiday destination*. This hardly
comes as a surprise to those of us who live here or visit regularly.
The danger for a sparsely populated region like ours is the pressures that come from elsewhere. Our scenic coastline
and bush-clad ranges attract people from all around the world. The natural attractions found around every corner are
seeing a growing number of travellers particularly over the summer months.
Destination Coromandel is the Regional Tourism Organisation tasked with marketing
The Coromandel
to the world, or
more specifically to key markets in our neighbouring regions – think Auckland, Waikato and Bay of Plenty. While the
marketing team acknowledges that they play a significant role in attracting visitors to our backyard (check out
www. thecoromandel.com tosee the calibre of their work), they believe that being referred to as New Zealand’s number one
holiday destination on a consistent basis requires a strategic approach from the whole industry.
Destination Coromandel believe they’ve come up with a simple formula to work towards this vision as illustrated
in
Beyond 2025.
This document challenges the local visitor industry to target three key areas in the next ten years
– Product Development, Seasonality and Quality. Working together, towards common goals is an outcome that
Destination Coromandel Manager Hadley Dryden is keen to see. “Basically we want to see the visitor industry looking
ahead and visualising how they’d like to see the local visitor experience in ten years time and working together to get
there.”
“This may reflect how they see their towns too. There are plenty of opportunities to improve the visitor experience
region-wide. It’s important that
The Coromandel
preserves the very attributes that attract people here today. ”
The Hauraki Rail Trail has been celebrated as a successful partnership. It has already attracted more visitors than
anticipated and surprisingly the busiest month was April.
Should
The Coromandel
wish to stay in touch with national aspirations we’ll be generating an additional $80 million
over and above what we’re currently trending towards, by 2025. Addressing seasonality and quality while developing
more visitor attractions may help progress towards this… but can it be done in a way that cements our reputation and
doesn’t cost the earth?
*NZ Herald DigiPoll Survey January 2015