Local Focus: Taupō tourism campaign goes local with Love This Place

It's a new campaign but based on an age-old premise.

Taupō has long been one of New Zealand's best-loved holiday spots. Now the "Love This Place" campaign is aiming to attract tourists from within the Taupō District, and draw people back into the town centre to support local businesses.

"As soon as this Covid-19 situation arose, it became really apparent we needed to do something quickly to activate our locals, to encourage them to be spending local and supporting our local businesses," said Kylie Hawker-Green of Enterprise Great Lake Taupō.

"It made sense to do that collaboratively and district-wide, rather than have pockets of promotions or pockets of activity. So it's really about bringing our collective forces together for good and creating some kind of platform to really encourage our community to support the amazing businesses we have across the district."

"It absolutely makes sense," said Taupō mayor David Trewavas.

"It's what I promote anyway, pretty much all year-round. This online shopping thing is good and convenient, but it doesn't support any local business at all really.

"The part-time jobs, the young ones and more senior people that get the jobs in these locations, it's just so important to keep the whole community ticking over."

For Hawker-Green, it's about encouraging locals to see more of the amazing sights and experiences Taupō has to offer.

"We really want to encourage our locals to have a 'stay-cation'," she said. "Our business community employs over 18,000 people, so it's critically important that those jobs remain. And in order for those jobs to remain, people have to be spending money locally.

"Last year, we know Taupō residents spent about $150 million outside their district on retail spending. We're really hoping we can change that behaviour and get a decent chunk of that being spent in our community to help keep those 18,000-plus jobs going."

Taupō's economy relies heavily on tourism. With no international or national visitors in the immediate future, Taupō is turning to its locals to keep it running.

Trewavas says the town needs to switch mindsets, from what is most convenient, to what supports locals the most.

Fifty kilometres south in Tūrangi, the Love This Place campaign is flourishing.

"The buy-in from the Tūrangi community has been quite significant," said Mike Bowie, owner of Tongariro Adventures B&B.

"They've set up a list of businesses that can operate under level 3 and really good support from Tūrangi, all very keen to promote themselves and tell the region 'yes, we are up and running'. All these things I think are very positive as far as getting Tūrangi back up on its feet."

The town and surrounding district of just over 4000 people are worried they might get overlooked and they're determined to get the community back on the map.

"The ultimate hope for Love This Place is having a place where anybody in the community can go and feel like they're connected into the community," said Hawker-Green.

"That they can find where they can get involved in something, they can find something they might not know about in the district, they can really get a sense of the role they all play as citizens of the Taupō District."

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