"It was in the mid-2000s when the internet was beginning to take off as a booking channel for the public," he said.
"I found myself quoting the travel company's rates and people would be sitting in front of their computers, accessing far cheaper rates direct."
He decided to start his own business, returned to New Zealand in 2005 and set up Beyond The Highway, an online consolidation website with full inventory database for the campervan industry in New Zealand and Australia.
The company targeted all campervan rental searches globally and set a sales team on all leads that were created.
He sold the company in 2007.
"It had got to the point where I didn't have the skills and experience to take it to the next level," he said.
However, running his own small business taught him a lot.
"I learned that you can never switch off and you'll be thinking about the business 24/7," he said.
"I learned you can't do it all yourself and you have to have the confidence and trust to employ people to do the work you can't do yourself."
He also learned that risk comes with rewards.
"And when you focus your mind on something to get it done and you put steps in place, they fall into place relatively easily," he said.
Mr Fitzgerald planned to set up another business, but with nothing specific in mind, he moved to Rotorua and joined Destination Rotorua in a marketing role, promoting the city as a destination for the international travel trade.
There he began to slowly put in place plans for creating Canopy Tours Rotorua.
One major element was luring on board Mr Blackford, who he had met some years earlier, for his engineering experience.
"A lesson I learned from the website days was that you need someone who can handle the technical side of things," he said.
A successful engineer, Mr Blackford ticked all the boxes in terms of ensuring the zipline operation was safe and secure.
While he has now returned to his engineering career fulltime, Mr Blackford remains a 50 per cent shareholder and is still active in Canopy Tours.
Another significant factor was working closely with the Department of Conservation (DoC) to get permission to create the tourist destination on public land.
Helen Neale, DoC's statutory relationship manager, who worked closely with Mr Fitzgerald in her previous role as Rotorua Partnerships manager, said he had been great to work with.
"He's very passionate about conservation the work he does as part of and alongside his business.
"We've had a very good working relationship with him."
Mr Fitzgerald said: "Andrew's engineering background and DoC support were crucial to getting us up and running."
However, when asked the key element for building any successful business from scratch, Mr Fitzgerald cited the support he enjoyed from his wife Erin and family as being crucial.
"You can become so singleminded and focused - particularly growing a small business - that you can forget the most important thing in the world, which is getting the business and home balance in tune."
Canopy Tours zipping up the competition
Before setting up his business, James Fitzgerald visited many of the major zipline operations in the US and Canada.
"We were new, and we didn't have the terrain to be the biggest, the longest or the highest zipline tour in the world," he said. "But we knew we had the environment. We knew if we could build a really good story around the environment and really focused on building an internal team culture of people who genuinely loved working here, then that would resonate through to the customer experience."
Canopy Tours now has 20,000 plus visitors a year and is continuing to build momentum.
The company uses high-speed internet services to allow visitors to share their VDO experiences almost immediately on social media.
"It's not just about what our visitors see, but about what they feel," he said.
"It's about their interaction with each other and how our team helps turn strangers into friends. The thrill of the ziplines is cool, but at the end of the day, the experience they had with other human beings, what they learned and what went on between their ears in their three hours with us, is what they end up talking about and sharing with others."
James Fitzgerald:
* Role: Co-founder, director and general manager, Canopy Tours Rotorua
* Born: Gisborne, New Zealand
* Age: 35
* First job: Tour bus driver
* Awards: 2014 Pacific Asia Travel Association New Zealand Trust Young Tourism Leader Award.
