Laying a golden egg

Destination Queenstown chair Richard Thomas CMInstD says “tourism will probably always be the main game in town”, but he sees the potential for a booming tech industry.

The world-renowned tourist magnet is quickly recovering from the pandemic but is still badly hampered by labour issues. An increase in the minimum wage and fair pay agreements coming into force could make that even more challenging for businesses.

“There is a lot of excitement in the district around the opportunities that Covid has given us,” Thomas says. “We’ve had a chance to sit back and reflect. The tech sector or tourism tech sector has always been here, but it’s small and niche. There’s been no clearly defined strategy of how to build that and grow the pie.”

Until now.

Richard Thomas

A 20-year plan for Queenstown to become a tech town is being hatched by tech entrepreneur Roger Sharp and Thomas is right behind it.

“Roger and his team are the sort of people that set goals and achieve them,” Thomas says. “I’d certainly back them to make it happen, whether that takes 10 years, or 15 or more.

“The tech industry can certainly grow and to a point where some of the revenues generated come off a much lower capital base than perhaps the traditional tourism sector.”

Thomas says there has been a lot of commentary about Queenstown having all its eggs in one basket, and “when you have 80 per cent of your visitation coming from international tourists, that’s partly true”.

“However, there is a lot of industry that’s spun off the back of tourism that’s always been here, including film, wine, education, tourism tech, high performance sport and health wellbeing.

“One of the challenges we’ve got as a district is to strengthen those industries, and help them stand up so if we get into a situation like this again, we won’t be so heavily impacted.”

Tourism has bounced back a lot quicker than anyone ever expected, he says, but the labour pool is shallow to arid-like. “We have something like 1,500 jobs across the district available. Everyone was impacted heavily [by Covid] and shared a lot of pain. We lost a lot of good talent from the region – a lot being highly skilled foreign workers.” 

Thomas feels they were wrongly tarnished with the brush of paying low wages when “we were always having to pay above market or above minimum wage and living wage to get and retain staff in Queenstown because it’s an expensive place to live”.

The customer experience was also impacted because businesses had to dial back their operations and offerings.

Thomas says another challenge is the energy supply and a power infrastructure needed to enable the Queenstown Lakes District’s regenerative tourism destination management plan to become a carbon-zero visitor economy by 2030. “There’s one line in. It is at absolute capacity now and nearly broken.”

He says the pandemic also made people realise the biggest asset they have is the environment they live in. “It’s about our place, our people and our prosperity. We need to look after them all. It’s pretty straightforward.”

Richard Thomas is also a director and owner of business consultancy Redwulff Ltd, a director of Skyline Enterprises and a director of tourism-tech marketing company Bookme Ltd. 

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