CD instant hit for operators

By SIMON HENDRY

Black Cat Group may be an award-winning scenic cruise company, but managing director Paul Bingham still found lots to learn when he tested a new CD toolkit for tourism operators.

Bingham, whose Lyttelton-based company won three awards for business excellence in this year's Tourism Awards, was asked to test the Tourism Industry Association's (TIA) Tourism Business Builder.

"We have some pretty good systems in place, so for us it was a matter of going through and almost reconfirming that we are doing things correctly," Bingham said.

"If you go through something like that and say, 'There's nothing I can learn to improve my business', you've got to be mad."

The association estimates that New Zealand has 8000 to 10,000 tourism businesses, of which about 80 per cent employ fewer than five staff.

The association's key projects manager, Malcolm Anderson, said the aim of the CD was to make a range of tools and reference material easily accessible to overworked, small tourism operators.

"They are busy running a business.

"If we can help them by developing these [tools] it makes life simpler for them."

The project comes out of the New Zealand Tourism Strategy 2010, a joint Government/industry blueprint for the sector produced in May last year.

One of the strategy's 43 recommendations was that the TIA - an umbrella group with 3500 members - work with operators to develop a range of resources for small and medium enterprises to use.

The CD also targets those considering getting into the industry.

"We're trying to make sure that people wanting to get involved in a tourism business have a bit more understanding and knowledge of the industry before they start - without negating the need for them to look to professionals for some parts of it," Anderson said.

"We're not going to become a professional consulting business in that sense."

The CD is divided into eight modules and covers topics such as assessing the viability of a proposed venture and developing a business plan, marketing strategies and guidance for entering the TIA's annual awards.

It also includes electronic versions of Tourism New Zealand's trade marketing flyers, which outline TNZ's international media programme and offer advice on marketing tourism ventures overseas.

Bingham, whose business employs up to 33 staff in the peak summer season, says the CD is comprehensive.

"There is pretty much everything in there in some format or another that you would need to know to start a tourism business or improve a current business.

"There was certainly nothing I could see that was missing."

He used the CD's promotion module as a primer when rewriting one of Black Cat's brochures.

"Even for operators like us who are a bit more established there is always something you will pick up on."

TIA chief executive John Moriarty said the association had consulted widely to produce the CD, and it was now up to operators to make the best use of the tools it provided.

It will be available free to TIA members from this month.

Small business membership of the association costs $350 plus gst a year, and Moriarty said the market value of the CD was about equal to a year's membership.

TIA is working with Industry New Zealand to offer a one-on-one business mentoring scheme in conjunction with the CD, something it hoped to have in place by early next year.

"The BIZinfo programme which Industry NZ runs is an ideal vehicle for that and we will be talking further with them about how to roll that out," Moriarty said.

Tourism is estimated to account for 10 per cent of the country's gross domestic product and support one job in 10.