July 3 2010
The long, quiet night of winter has once again descended on Nelson. Geoff Collett looks for signs of life in the off-season. And inside, we find out how city retailers are faring.
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Whoever coined the old "sleepy hollow" line about Nelson was surely regarding the place one mid-winter's evening: the tightly curtained windows, the all-but-empty streets and darkened business premises, the "closed for winter" signs sprinkled about the place.
After all, if the rest of the world has always loved us for our summers, it can be relied on to abandon us again like the most shameless Lothario come the cool days and long nights. And Nelson left to its own devices can be a quiet old place.
We all understand why: a heavily seasonal economy, much of it geared around tourism and horticulture which make their hay while the sun shines and whose workforces largely drift away when the work dries up.
Even a champion of local business like chamber of commerce chief executive Dot Kettle concedes that Trafalgar St can make a forlorn sight on a winter's day. Most of Nelson's economy is not so seasonal, she hastens to add - most business continues to operate as normal, if "slightly under the radar".
But others say that whatever we do, we can't fight nature - especially human nature to hunker down in winter.
It's the difference between January Nelson and July Nelson that really rubs it in. The spikes on the Statistics New Zealand graph tracking visitor nights spent in local accommodation houses tell it as bluntly as anything.
In mid to late summer, demand for beds is as high as anywhere in the country; in mid-late winter the occupancy rate plummets to one of the lowest, down there with the likes of the West Coast and Southland.
Every year, there's talk of how to shallow out those deep troughs, or to spread the sharp peaks further out. Tough times add a more urgent tone.
This year, it's a conference centre that's being touted as the answer. A few years back it was an events strategy.
Nelson motelier and motel association branch president Paul Anderson was no stranger to Nelson or the motel business when he moved up here from Christchurch about five years ago, so knew what to expect of the down season. "But I was a wee bit surprised at the middle of winter, at how quiet it can be, " he admits. "You buy your business on the overall figures, so in that way you know it's coming. But you do sit here and look at them and say, 'We've got all this capital tied up in the middle of winter - and that's only what we've got tied up'."
Darryl Wilson has a big chunk of his business' capital sitting in a shed by the Nelson marina right now, about $2 million worth in the form of Wilsons Abel Tasman's flagship, the Abel Tasman Voyager.
The 20-metre, 140-passenger catamaran, launched two years ago to help ferry the crowds between Kaiteriteri and the park, is in for some maintenance and improvements at Dickson Marine.
Come summer, the Voyager does return trips along the national park's coastline three times a day. In late June, "as I was flippantly saying the other day, we're probably making more money by having this in the shed at the moment than we are running it, because we substitute it and just run a [18-seat] water taxi for a month", Mr Wilson says.
Even if, as is often said, the Abel Tasman is at its best on the right winter's day, the numbers make clear when the people prefer to be there.
"I don't know what's travelling out in the park today among all the operators, but if it was more than 50 people, I'd be surprised, " he says.
Conservation Department statistics back the point: Abel Tasman "bed nights" (the number of beds occupied each night in a DOC hut or campground in the park) totalled month by month peak at around 13,000 in January and bottom out at around 900 in July and August.
Mr Wilson firmly subscribes to the view that tourism is a seasonal business the world over, that nothing more than human nature drives the peaks and troughs.
"I liken our business model to most other producers in this region . . . the bank managers who struggle with tourism . . . I just tell them to go and talk to their rural advisers, because we [the tourism operators] are cropping, we're fertilising-slash-marketing, we're doing all the same cycles that so many businesses do in New Zealand."
He adds that Nelson operators, including his business, have slowly pushed the high season out further and further. About 30 years ago, high season in the Abel Tasman lasted two weeks. Now, it runs for months.
But he readily concedes that navigating the peaks and troughs demands steady nerves and a steady hand - and a business model which might see a year's worth of profits made in three months.
"The rest of the time, we minimise [losses], really."
He admits, too, that it's hard to soften the impact on staff once Easter passes and the brakes go on.
In Wilsons' case, about 20 staff stay on the payroll over the off-season."One of my biggest regrets is that we can't keep more."
Mr Anderson echoes the sentiment from the motelier's perspective. At this time of year, "we have a high degree . . . of low hours for a working group that in my experience is very conscientious and very hard-working, and we would love to be offering them more hours and I know they would love to be doing them".
In Collingwood, Paddy Gillooly, who operates Farewell Spit Eco Tours, is philosophical about the annual routine of seeing workers disappear as winter arrives.
His company keeps on those it can, catching up on maintenance in between catering for the relative handful of tourists who do want to make trips to the spit on the days when conditions allow.
Like any long-time tourism businessman, he's learned to live with the seasonality, but that doesn't mean he isn't looking for opportunities.
A few years ago, he came up with a light-hearted event to inject a bit of life into Collingwood over the quietest weekend of the year, in late August. The Gnome Away From Home - a weekend of activities for garden gnomes and their owners - has attracted numbers in the low hundreds and growing since it started, enough to help fill pubs, restaurants and accommodation in the town.
"But again, that's only one weekend, " Mr Gillooly says.
Perhaps the strongest sign of how seriously Nelson's winter-summer imbalance is regarded can be found in Nelson-Tasman Tourism's "key performance indicators", set by its council shareholders.
Its soon-to-depart chief executive, Paul Davis, says the tourism organisation has been charged with shifting 6 per cent of the current peak season visitor nights into the quieter months.
"It might not sound much, but it's huge, " he says. "It's about cashflow of businesses in the off- season, keeping more people employed in the winter, giving those who are employed more hours - really, it's about the performance of the winter economy."
Various marketing promotions are under way, with an emphasis on the spring "shoulder" season. But Mr Davis thinks that conferences could be a magic bullet for Nelson's winter ennui.
The tourism body is convinced the demand to bring more big conferences to Nelson is there, and that the region is perfectly suited for them, with its attractiveness to visitors, good air services and central location.
It already enjoys some success - "we do certain size conferences - up to 300 [delegates] - really well", says its domestic marketing manager, Nicki van Asch. But its overall market share is tiny, especially in the lucrative large- scale gatherings.
Ms van Asch produces a letter from the quarry industry's national body, which recently took its 425-delegate event to Blenheim ahead of Nelson, because we didn't have a suitable venue.
Quarry NZ's man put it bluntly: "The Trafalgar Centre should have been demolished years ago and replaced by a custom- designed convention and exhibition facility."
Mr Davis calculates the quarry conference would have injected $112,000 into the city on conference spending alone.
"We know that Nelson can attract that kind of conference on a regular basis, and we also know that we're missing it because we don't have a conference centre to cater for it."
Nelson City Council is offering little hope, this week shelving the suggestion of it getting involved in helping develop a new centre anytime soon.
Mayoral hopeful Rachel Reese is one who has been trying to push it up the agenda. She is another who thinks that a concerted effort to improve Nelson's appeal to conference organisers would deliver a crucial fillip to all manner of businesses.
"In this kind of economic climate, where the ability to borrow is really limited, cashflow becomes even more critical, " she says. "Maybe businesses in boom times can survive [by] having a five or six month season, but realistically ... for a cafe owner, I would have thought some year- round cashflow would be hugely advantageous."
If a large, purpose-built conference centre to help lift Nelson's winter gloom has so far been elusive, the campaign to boost the number of off-season events here as a possible tourist magnet has been slow-going.
A couple of years ago, an events strategy bankrolled by the Nelson City Council was introduced, somewhat controversially, to help build that off-season. It aims to encourage event organisers to move their activities out of the crowded summer schedule and into quieter times when they might help attract visitors.
Mr Davis says the strategy remains a "work in progress".
He points to the Marchfest beer event as one which is showing early potential; others with promise are the Nelson Motorcycle Show (run by Rotary), a cycle festival and the new "Wild and Sneaky Art" festival (Wasa), planned as a fringe event alongside the spring arts festival.
"These events take time to build and they usually start from humble beginnings, " Mr Davis says.
Queenstown's acclaimed and high-profile winter festival, he adds, started as a community fundraiser something like 20 years ago.
Mr Anderson is one who wonders, though. "Some events I think are good", he says, "but I think they're going for the hard dollar and missing the easy one".
He points to the "hundreds" of car rallies held around the country by car clubs who want an annual gathering for enthusiasts to show off their vehicles.
He thinks Nelson could easily organise and promote itself as a car-club friendly destination and reap the rewards. "To me, that's the easy money."
Of course, some things do happen in Nelson through even the longest nights. Next week sees the return of one oasis on the calendar, the Nelson School of Music's Winter Festival.
It started 16 years ago as the school's centennial celebration, building gradually, generally succeeding, and in the past couple of years advertising nationally in the hope of bringing in out-of- towners looking for an excuse for a few nights away.
Festival manager Frances McElhinney says that seems to be working, although often, festival staff only discover that concert goers are visitors through conversations at the bar.
They've also learned that there are some elements of human nature you just can't change.
Last year the festival organisers made a point of scheduling shows to start early and finish early in the hope that people would head into town afterwards for a drink or a meal.
"But they didn't do it, " Mrs McElhinney says. "They said, 'that was a great night', and then they went home.
"I don't know what you do to motivate them."
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