New Zealand’s capital city Wellington is getting $2.5million tourism fund to attract more Chinese tourists.
The ratepayers and Kiwi taxpayers of Wellington is helping to raise a fund for new multi million-dollar initiative to lure Chinese tourists to the capital city.
Sir Richard Taylor’s Weta Studio Tours is also on board with a tourism collaboration which includes Te Papa, KiwiRail, Wellington International Airport and the Wellington Regional Economic Development Agency (Wreda). China is New Zealand’s second-largest tourism market with 447,800 visitors a year, but only 12 per cent of those currently visit Wellington. They spent $54 million here in the past 12 months.
The partnership dubbed ‘Team Wellington’ will give the capital’s tourism efforts in China a $2.5million dollars boost over the next five years.
The tourism funds will be channeled through WREDA, which was now “actively” aiming to grow the number of Chinese visitors to central New Zealand. Some of funding will be used to employ Wreda’s first Mandarin-speaking China tourism manager, who will deal directly with Chinese travel trade and tourism operators, and spread the word through Chinese social media platforms like WeChat and Weibo and target ‘high value’ independent travellers. Wreda would not say how much funding was contributed by each entity, but confirmed Wellington Airport was significantly the biggest funder. The other amounts were “proportionate to the size of the businesses”. Weta Workshop general manager David Wilks said the numbers of Chinese visitors to the Weta Cave had been growing, aided by the introduction of a dedicated Mandarin language tour.
Wellington gets significantly fewer visitors than Auckland, Queenstown and Christchurch. The ‘Team Wellington’ project is being backed by Tourism New Zealand (TNZ) which will work with Wreda to use the Wellington region as a lever to boost regional dispersal of tourists to the middle of the country.
TNZ spokesman Rene de Monchy said the initiative was well-timed with 2019 being the China-New Zealand Year of Tourism.
