Travel talks: Sarah Arkin, wedding planner

Sarah Arkin.

People in the industry discuss their job and issues they face.

Sarah Arkin is director of Simply Perfect Weddings and the president of the Queenstown Wedding Association. The wedding industry is estimated to be worth $58 million to Queenstown.

Arkin grew up in New Hampshire and studied in Georgia, doing a marketing degree with an event planning component. She moved to Lake Tahoe in California where she first worked on a ski field and then in events planning for a resort.

She moved to New Zealand in 2007 and started her small business, which handles about 50 weddings a year. Most are for between 20 to 60 guests although she gets about 10 "elopers", who want a private wedding at the top of a mountain that they are flown to by helicopter.

What are the biggest challenges facing your business at the moment?

Educating key markets on the offerings that Queenstown has as a destination wedding location. Since the wedding industry is generally made up of several small businesses with limited individual marketing budgets, it can be difficult to reach the larger international markets where advertising and promotion can be quite expensive.

The wedding industry is trying to overcome this challenge by pooling our resources.

How will the fall in the kiwi dollar against our main tourism partners affect your operation?

Like many other tourism businesses, the falling kiwi dollar can benefit many of the association's 120 businesses since markets are primarily based overseas.

There is often a rise in the number of wedding couples from the US, Britain and other strong currency countries as the kiwi dollar weakens overseas. The wedding industry's largest international market is Australia, so this currency relationship is probably the most important one to follow.

What initiatives do you have under way this year?

Every year our main goal is to increase the awareness of Queenstown as a premier destination wedding location.

We use social media and international wedding blogs to share images of recent weddings, which tends to sell our weddings the best as it is hard to beat some of the wedding photographs that you can get here. The association is also starting to work with member businesses to educate them on how they can increase their individual marketing efforts through some inexpensive channels.

Is the industry in good shape ?

The wedding industry has never been stronger than it is now in Queenstown. We have seen tremendous growth in the past few years, and there was close to a 40 per cent increase in the number of weddings taking place from 2013 to 2014 (from 600 to 834) with numbers continuing to grow. The Queenstown wedding industry generated more than $58 million in revenue in 2014 and a wide array of businesses profit from this revenue stream.

How is your business affected by new technology/digital disrupters?

Couples want to ensure that any recommendations they make to their friends and family are well researched, so new technology has certainly made this much easier for them with readily available reviews and a wider array of options at their fingertips.