Travel bugs: On the rise of shopping malls as tourist destinations

Katy Perry. Photo / Supplied

Tim Roxborogh on the joys of moaning about your holiday

Shopping malls as tourist attractions

It's bizarre the things some people think are tourist attractions. The Auckland Explorer Bus has 16 listed hop-on and hop-off attractions where controversially, Auckland Zoo and Bastion Point are forced to rub shoulders with St Lukes shopping mall. Now, no offense to St Lukes, indeed none other than the great Steve Braunias saw fit to rate it the top Auckland mall in his recent article "Power ranking the malls of Auckland" (NZ Herald, September 28, 2019). But is it really where we want to send international tourists? And if so, is it really in the top 16 things to do in this city of 1.6 million people?

At least it's not Dress Smart in Onehunga. I'm uncertain if anybody has ever visited that mall and not dinged their car in that walls-closing-in, anxiety-nightmare-come-to-life carpark. Like St Lukes, Dress Smart serves a purpose, but they are purposes entirely for locals. In the case of St Lukes, it's a perfectly nice suburban mall, so nice in fact, that Braunias scored it 9.3 out of 10, praising it for having, "all sorts of levels" and "not a dud moment to be had".

But do we really expect tourists from Asia or North America or Europe (or essentially anywhere in the world) to be impressed with a food court, a sloping floor and 168 shops?

As for Dress Smart, I've spoken with disappointed foreign visitors who've rued picking up Auckland must-do brochures telling them this 110-store outlet centre was a "must-visit". Now, I like a bargain as much as the next guy, possibly even more so. But there's only so much the lure of a discount on a pair of not-quite-right jeans will forgive, and a claustrophobic maze with the country's worst carpark isn't it. Braunias didn't even review it, but a generous 4.2 from 10 is all I've got.

That said, I know that for many Aucklanders, those Dress Smart prices are worth the substandard shopping experience and that for them it's merely another day in the city in which they live. Put yourself in the shoes of a tourist and it's a precious afternoon wasted and a sense of confusion that if this is one of the recommended sites to see, how underwhelming must everything else in Auckland be?

Sylvia Park isn't off the hook with me either. For reasons unknown, pop megastar Katy Perry paid the place a visit when she toured New Zealand just over a year ago. Braunias may've scored Sylvia Park 9 out of 10, but it's unforgivable for me for a mall of over 200 shops to only be two-storeys high (and mostly just the one level). The footprint of Sylvia Park is absurdly, unnecessarily large. Why not build up a fraction like they do with the megamalls overseas?

Given Katy Perry hails from the materialistic epicentre that is Southern California, what would Sylvia Park give her that she didn't already have? Wouldn't she have been better to have been directed to the boutiques of Parnell, the bohemian shops of K' Rd or the hip fashion stores of Ponsonby or Britomart?

To cut to the chase, you can love New Zealand malls, hate New Zealand malls or find them kind of here nor there. But if tourists come from, say, Malaysia, then they are used to malls like Kuala Lumpur's Berjaya Times Square that are 12 levels, have indoor theme-parks and house more than 1000 shops. If they're from the Middle East, then Tehran's Iran Mall now has more than 2500 shops and is now the largest in the world.

In Canada, there's Edmonton's West Edmonton Mall with its 800+ shops and from the UK to the Philippines to everywhere in between, malls that dwarf our own are not in short supply. And that's fine. We don't have to compete. But we also don't need to tell tourists to visit them.

Tim Roxborogh hosts Newstalk ZB's Weekend Collective and blogs at RoxboroghReport.com