With daylight savings ending earlier this month, the ‘Te Anau Time’ tourism campaign has been causing confusion for some visitors, while others in the town say it provides priceless marketing. 

The campaign, which has featured prominently on national news media, states that Te Anau is sticking with daylight savings time for good in 2022. 

Christine Wallace, co-owner of tourism operator Fiordland Outdoors Co., says she has experienced several instances where customers were confused and arrived late, having taken the campaign literally. 

“We’ve had about four instances where people have turned up on daylight savings time, meaning they were an hour late. These people were pretty grumpy about the misunderstanding.” 

“It’s caused a little bit of confusion and anxiety with people meeting their transport, especially if they are in a remote location. It can be quite problematic.” 

Wallace says that while it has been good to see Te Anau receive recognition through the campaign, she doesn’t feel that it has been made clear enough that the town was not actually switching time zones. 

“I don’t feel as an operation that it’s been made clear to people that it’s marketing ploy, or what I would say is a gimmick. Now was the time to clarify things, and to be clear with the public with what the intention of it really is.” 

Kate Norris, co-owner of Fiordland guiding company Trips & Tramps, says in her experience the campaign has been a purely positive thing. 

“I think it’s great. It’s free publicity for the operators in the town, and we haven’t experienced any confusion.”

“The other night we were on the prime-time news, while other towns were having to pay for their adverts in the ad breaks. It’s priceless marketing for us, really.” 

Norris says she thinks the campaign has got people around the country talking about Te Anau in a positive way.

“Most people have taken it in the spirit that it is meant, it’s very good marketing for the town,” she says.

Anke Ruwette, Tourism Marketing Manager at Great South who led the campaign, says it is among the most successful they have run, but acknowledges that some confusion has been caused. 

“The campaign has had over 20 million views, which would equal every person in New Zealand seeing Te Anau Time four times each.”

“We wanted Te Anau front of mind, and people are talking about it. We’ve had people saying they’ve heard of Te Anau time, and they wanted to come and see it for themselves.”

“This is the first time we’ve heard from people that they have seen a campaign and then come because of that.” 

Ruwette says the somewhat confusing nature of the campaign is one of the reasons it has been so successful and far-reaching.  

“It did cause a little bit of confusion; I definitely agree with that. We understand the local view of ‘what is happening?’, but we didn’t want to tell too many people what we were planning, we wanted to have that surprise effect.” 

“Our thinking was how we could get this in front of as many people as possible.”

“Even with the confusion and even some of the negative comments as well, it meant that people were talking about it. It was a bit of a stunt to get Te Anau in the news, and it worked,” she says.