OUR VIEW: Big boost to all as visitors stay local

An increase in the number of cruise ship visitors choosing to take trips around Tauranga while onshore, rather than heading to Rotorua, can only be good for our city.
Some of the credit for the increase is being given to a new port-side information centre.
So far this cruise ship season, 58 per cent of tours sold through the information centre have been Tauranga-based, while 42 per cent took cruise ship passengers to Rotorua.
That's a complete flip on the previous season's tally, which saw 58 per cent of tours booked by passengers disembarking from their cruise ships heading to Rotorua.
Tourism Bay of Plenty general manager Tim Burgess said the centre was designed to provide passengers with more immediate and accurate information, allowing them to better plan their day.
There's no doubt though, that local tourism authorities will be hoping the centre encourages visitors to spend their onshore time in Tauranga, rather than in the city's southern sister, and on the face of it, their wishes so far appear to be coming true.
The spin-offs of having more cruise ship passengers in Tauranga are both obvious and plentiful.
The most obvious positive spin-impact is for local retailers, who will benefit from tourists spending up large while in Tauranga.
Word-of-mouth also comes into play - if all the people who spend time in our city tell just one friend back home about the positive experience they had here, the potential for others to come and visit grows.
Of course, positive word-of-mouth is dependent on those who visit here actually enjoying their time in Tauranga.
The addition of new tourist features including the Maori cultural experience "Te Whetu Arataki" at The Cargo Shed, and a "hop-on hop-off" bus tour which takes passengers on an hour-long loop trip around Tauranga and Mount Maunganui attractions, will help with this.
Mr Burgess has also put the rise in people taking tours around Tauranga down to an increase in Australian passengers, described as more "price sensitive".
Local tours offered more value for money to these passengers, because the price was not inflated by the travel component built into the Rotorua tours.
While this is a valid point, the relative cheapness of Tauranga tours versus their Rotorua counterparts has likely always been a factor to the advantage of the local tourism industry, and it's hard to understand why tourism authorities have not exploited this to their benefit earlier.
Rotorua does not need to feel threatened by Tauranga.
With its raft of attractions including the Zorb, Rainbow Springs Kiwi Wildlife Park, the luge and the Agrodome, Rotorua's role as a tourism centre is secure.
However, Tauranga still faces the challenge of making the most of its potential as a tourist destination.