Tourism Collaboration Preserves Industry Jobs

Skilled workers will remain employed within New Zealand’s tourism industry as the result of a collaboration between tourism marketing company Tomahawk and car rental company GO Rentals.

Members of GO Rentals’ IT development team have been taken on by Auckland-based Tomahawk to develop an innovative new product designed to help boost the New Zealand’s tourism industry and the country’s economy.

The new product is part of Tomahawk’s pivot during this challenging time and to help the industry at large. Due to be launched in August, the new product requires the specialist skills of developers who understand New Zealand’s tourism industry and have senior app development experience.

Tomahawk Director Gina Paladini said that they are delighted to have the team from GO Rentals on board.

“GO Rentals is a terrific company that is innovative and truly customer focused. They have a great industry reputation and a big reason for that stellar reputation is the calibre of their people,” said Ms Paladini.

“The team at Callaghan Innovation were aware that GO were pitching their development services to try and protect their IT people, so we were excited when they made the introduction. We quickly realised we had the perfect project that would utilise their niche expertise, complement our existing team and help us to create an even better product. Our development team have loved working, brain bouncing and learning app skills with them too.”

GO Rentals Managing Director James Dalglish said “It’s a golden opportunity to work with the team at Tomahawk, which has in turn provided security to a number of roles in our organisation. The really exciting thing is that this is a genuine tourism product innovation we are working on, which is very likely to benefit many operators in our heavily affected industry. We’re so incredibly grateful to Gina and John for the chance to be involved”

The New Zealand tourism industry has already seen thousands of job losses due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with latest estimates predicting 100,000 job losses in total.

Ms Paladini said that tourism operators worldwide have been forced to look at ways to pivot their businesses under the current conditions.

“Tomahawk is just one of thousands of tourism operators that has basically had to stop and become a start-up all over again,” said Ms Paladini.

“With the increased capacity of our fabulous development team, the buy-in of our friends within the tourism industry and the backing of multiple other sectors too, we’re excited to launch our new product and do our bit to help get our tourism industry thriving again. To be able to do this through collaboration with another industry player just makes is all the sweeter.”

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