In a 3 December letter to HB Tourism, the HB Regional Council confirmed it will provide no funding to that organisation after 30 June 2025. More clamour has ensued.
As I wrote back in May, claims that the Hawke’s Bay’s visitor economy will be devastated because of the Regional Council ending its funding of HB Tourism are absurd … that’s a ‘chicken little’ fable.
The ‘visitor economy’ of Hawke’s Bay is multi-faceted and important. And will remain so.
Here are some of the engines of that economy that will keep generating visitors, whatever the future scale of HB Tourism Inc.
Friends & Family
Your extended families – cuzzies, brothers and sisters, grandparents, etc – will never stop coming – so long as family comity continues! They don’t need ads from HB Tourism to entice them. You and HB ‘at large’ just need to show them a good time when they get here.
Event goers
A HUGE driver of visitors. From Horse of the Year to major sports competitions and marathons, to concerts and celebrations of all scale and tastes. All directly promoted outside the region by their commercial and venue sponsors. Many scheduled year after year. And many already subsidised by our territorial councils. After all, who ‘books’ and promotes McLean Park, the Showgrounds, the Sports Park, Black Barn, Church Road, The Mission, the War Memorial Centre and on and on. Not HB Tourism.
Taking the Sports Park and Fitness/Aquatic Centres for instance, these facilities already have competitions scheduled into 2025. Competitions in swimming, water polo, canoe polo and athletics draw athletes from across NZ. For example, the NZ National Age Group Swimming Championships, booked for 2025 and 2026, will host approximately 630 competitors from outside the region along with 3,000 spectators (92% from outside the region) over five days.
A number of councils (including NCC) and event organisers use a standard methodology (Event Economics from Fresh Info) to measure the net economic value of major events, adding some rigour to the assessment process.
Business travelers
Hawke’s Bay is an export economy. Our out-of-region/country suppliers, clients and customers routinely travel here. Our councils pay millions to their Auckland lawyers alone to come down and smooth their problems. Then there are all those infrastructure consultants. If business is thriving in HB, business travel will thrive.
All of these visitors have fun experiences, enjoy our food and wine and go home to tell their friends and relatives about it … no less so than any 6-hour cruise ship passenger or any other bona fide ‘tourist’. The same word-of-mouth multiplier effect, but much larger and, I submit, more likely to generate another future visit or visitor.
And that’s the point. Hawke’s Bay has a robust, important, durable visitor economy, in which tourists play, by comparison, a small part.
If the local ‘tourism’ industry and HBT want to dispute that, they should do the homework and make a contrary case.
But that’s never happened. Even with years of explicit warning from HBRC to HB Tourism Inc about its funding reluctance. There has never been a ‘strategic review’ of the overall Hawke’s Bay visitor/tourist economy – closely examining what the constituent activities are that generate travel here and their relative contribution to the pot … and what/whose sales/marketing process and spending actually gets those visitors here.
No one has calculated the total promotional spend over a typical year by all the venues, events and their sponsors that attract visitors from outside the region. To which must be added and assessed the considerable marketing spend of our four territorial councils.
That’s the context in which we should have a regional visitor strategy and sort what methods and monies — private or public — might best prime the pump. That’s an exercise we should have expected and seen from HB Tourism or one of HB’s succession of Regional Economic Development agencies.
Instead, absent an informed analysis and visitor strategy, we get a heap of knee-jerk reaction because HB Tourism needs to raise $1.52 million from different pockets than the Regional Council.
HBT has produced and is shopping to other councils a revised “minimum funding” budget of $1 million which, with increased industry membership fees, will support 5 FTEs and maintain its website, Facebook and Instagram presence, database and image library.
Not to worry HB Tourism, the sky won’t fall … for you or for Hawke’s Bay.
Our other councils look likely to shift the HBT cost to their ratepayers, who look amazingly like the same people currently footing the bill.
And whether or not they do, our friends & relatives, our business colleagues, the athletes, the Art Deco fanatics, the concert goers – even cruise ship passengers – will still come to Hawke’s Bay, unaware of the tempest. Which is fine.
