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| Hospitality Magazine column Tourism Strategy great positioning statement New Zealand Tourism Strategy 2015 is a great positioning statement for New Zealand. It rightly identifies that whether New Zealand likes it or not, the environment and how its cared for is going to be a key factor in determining the travel destinations of the next generation of international tourists. The strategy highlights very well the work that New Zealand businesses in the tourism hospitality sector need to do to position themselves to capture future growth from tourism. Much of it is common sense business practice with economic advantages. As businesses identify sound sustainable practices they will be able to include these as a focus of their marketing strategy. Delivering a sustainable eco-friendly face to the world is perhaps the easiest of the challenges faced by the hospitality sector. Much more difficult is generating the profits to sustain the practice and finding enough staff to deliver the service. By 2011, well short of 2015, the hospitality sector is predicted to have generated an additional 13,580 jobs. 9,840 of these are in the accommodation, pubs, caf￩, restaurants and commercial sector. Global pressure on the job market suggests it is not going to be easy to find these people and it will require not just an increase in remuneration but innovative approaches to finding new sources of labour and improving productivity. The overriding issue though is improving bottom line profitability so that both increased wages and the investment in sustainability can be funded. For this to occur hospitality and tourism industries need to begin to compete on value added rather than price. New Zealand can not and should not compete in the discount market. None of this is simple so while the New Zealand Tourism Strategy is a great positioning statement it has also identified that individual businesses have a real challenge in front of them to deliver on that strategy. Bruce H Robertson |
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