Auckland Airport a 'conductor' for New Zealand tourism, CEO Littlewood says

Thursday 22nd October 2015

Auckland International Airport chief executive Adrian Littlewood said the big change in the company under his three-year tenure has been moving beyond simply being an infrastructure developer and operator to being an active leader in driving the country’s economic wealth.

New Zealand's busiest gateway has taken a pro-active role in growing national tourism which is expected to soon overtake dairying as the country’s leading export earner after three consecutive years of strong growth.

"In some ways the airport plays a conductor role," Littlewood said. "No one party touches international passengers all the way through."

Director Richard Didsbury, who’s helping drive the company’s push to become a major commercial property player, told shareholders at the company’s annual meeting in Auckland he wanted to stay on the board because of the immense satisfaction he got from helping drive its new long-term direction.

Auckland Airport had shifted from managing “some concrete to being a proactive generator of economic growth in the country”, he said.

Aspirational growth targets the airport put in place when Littlewood became CEO included reigniting growth in New Zealand tourism markets after almost 10 years of modest performance. The airport’s 30-year development plan is to grow from the current 15.8 million passengers to 40 million in 2044.

Last year the company received $1.11 million from the Tourism Growth Partnership Fund and said it would invest up to $1.75 million in a food and wine retail and tourism cluster project to accelerate high value tourism growth out of China. The project focuses on building sustainable air connectivity by growing high value passenger numbers from China.

Total Chinese visitor numbers to New Zealand have risen 35 percent in the past year, according to Statistics New Zealand.

The TGP project started with developing a stronger in-market presence for kiwi fine food and wine offerings in the Guangdong region from which there are now direct flights to New Zealand. The project takes a cluster approach to uniting kiwi tourism operators, travel sellers, and product retailers and set up a website promoting premium NZ products.

Littlewood said New Zealand’s tourism industry is fragmented with a number of small players who struggle to find the resources to promote the country as a destination, and until now it has largely fallen on the shoulders of Air New Zealand and Tourism New Zealand.

He said Auckland Airport’s brand had “standing and credibility” in a market like China where smaller tourism players can struggle to get cut-through. The challenge with the TGP project will be how to make it sustainable without government funding, he said.

The next step was emulate what has been done in China to Indonesia and India which are the next most obvious markets to develop, he said.

One of big changes ahead for Auckland Airport was in how it engaged with customers, he said, given around half of travel is now booked online.

“We’re in the process of shifting from what I call our traditional or ‘current mode’ of operation to a ‘future mode’, enabling us to take advantage of the advances in technology to build stronger and more direct relationships with customers through mobile and online challenges, through managing our operations using much more granular and real-time data, and by sharing that with partners at the airport through a highly collaborative work model,” he said.

Its investment in systems and technology and its partnership with travel technology company TripIt, were already paying dividends though this closer relationship with customers was “new territory for airports”, he said.

“We have seen that Air New Zealand can do a lot for New Zealand but if we want other airlines to be successful in New Zealand we have to work a bit harder. Some of them fly to 90 destinations and our job is to make sure we support valuable opportunities for them and work with other tourism providers on that.”

BusinessDesk.co.nz

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