Matt Cowley Tauranga City Councillor

This summer will be Tauranga's biggest cruise ship season ever with 78 ships carrying more than 166,000 visitors.

I'm proud that cruise ship tourists rate our i-Port as the third-best welcome in Australasia.

But did you know that cruise ship visitors only make up approximately 12 per cent of the total tourist spend in the Western Bay of Plenty each year? That's with more than half of the cruise tourists staying within the local area.

Around 70 percent of our region's annual tourist spending comes from domestic tourists. Most of them are visiting friends and family.

This means Tauranga residents are our best advocates when communicating with visitors. But I regularly hear how local residents don't know what's happening in the city.

The roads, port, and airport provide physical gateways into the city, but we lack a single, trusted digital gateway online. Many cities overseas have a central trusted website that promotes what's happening, how to get around, and information for people/businesses wanting to move here.

We're working with Tourism Bay of Plenty to find out how our key tourist markets find information about where they want to go and how they make their spending decisions.

I'm interested to find out whether the role of the physical visitor information buildings is changing as more tourists book activities online directly from the business owner. This bypasses the ability for visitor information centres to charge commissions.

This may mean smaller, better located information centres, supported by a savvy, user-friendly presence online. It may also mean information services are less reliant on tourist commissions and is instead supported by the wider community.

We have to keep moving with the times, meaning if we stand still, we are falling behind. While we have a great reputation at welcoming cruise visitors, it's only a small part of our overall tourism market.

I believe establishing Tauranga's integrated online presence, used by locals and tourists, would shift us in the right direction.

Feel free to email me your thoughts (matt.cowley@tauranga.govt.nz), call/text me on 0276989548, and follow me atwww.facebook.com/a.younger.voice.