NEW ZEALAND: Reward For Tourism Dedication

WHILE other neighbouring regional tourism organisations have come and gone, former Tourism Eastland president Penny Shaw has remained involved with this region’s tourism body in an unbroken period of “hard graft” to promote the region to the rest of New Zealand.

Following a 30-year and ongoing period of service to tourism, which has seen a million visitors go through the Gisborne i-Site in the past 10 years and created a lasting “legacy” for the region, Mrs Shaw has now been made a life member of Tourism Eastland.

She is just the seventh person to be awarded the accolade and the first not to have been associated with the organisation’s predecessor, the former Public Relations Office.

Tourism Eastland chief executive Stuart Perry said the award was well deserved.

“The board decided unanimously Penny should be awarded a life membership for her work for the organisation.

“In a way, a lot of the work Penny and other board members have done over the years is unseen because our responsibility and our work is outside the district.

“A lot of the work has been unsung. It’s not by chance or good luck that 113,000 people came through the visitor centre last year. When you go back over the decade, that’s 1 million people who have been through the centre and the reason they have been here is because Penny and the team have been putting us out there.

“All that graft and hard work actually results in tourism being successful.”

Mr Perry estimated the work done to create the Grey Street i-Site in the early days was still probably saving ratepayers about $150,000 every year.

“The legacy of it is it is a freehold building, sitting on council long-term lease land. It generates enough income to subsidise the operation of the i-Site by up to 50 percent.”

Mrs Shaw stepped down as president last year. She began her association with tourism here in 1985 with the Greater East Cape United Council, the original regional tourism organisation (RTO), when she was involved in creating a marketing plan to receive government funding for tourism promotion.

“We realised the community were actually funding the RTO as well as the community Public Relations Office. We felt the community were paying double membership, so then we spent a year making a constitution that allowed us to be one organisation, information centre as well as an RTO.”

That organisation was set up in 1987 and renamed Tourism Eastland a few years later.

During her role in marketing the organisation, she also started tutoring a tourism course at Tairawhiti Polytechnic.

“We changed from a foundation tourism programme to the National Travel and Tourism programme, so the students here could get a national qualification.”

An eco-tourism course followed in the 1990s during a 20-year stint as a tutor.

“I’ve always been on, or involved in the board. Representing the RTO at trade shows, you meet so many other people in tourism — it has been wonderful to spread the word that way.

“We have had quite a powerful voice for a small area because we’ve been stable. Both in the Bay of Plenty and Hawke’s Bay, we’ve seen organisations come and go with their RTOs and we’ve been the one with the solid foundation.”

Mrs Shaw said while the organisation was not funded to attend as many trade shows as in the past, she continued to extoll the virtues of the region on a voluntary basis.

“I always have a visitor guide and map in my bag, no matter where I am in the world.”