Tourism Minister Peeni Henare. Photo: RNZ // Angus Dreaver
The government is being urged to pitch in to help communities fund their visions for managing their destinations.
Millions of dollars have already been earmarked to help regional tourism organisations to develop and implement destination management plans.
Hawke's Bay Tourism chief executive Hamish Saxton said regional tourism organisations have received great support from the government in recent years.
"As part of that, regions were encouraged - almost mandated - to develop destination management plans," Saxton said.
"The biggest challenge moving forward is that since funding from government has concluded, it puts regional tourism organisations and regions as a whole in a very challenging position of how they're going to implement these plans."
His regional tourism organisation was dependent on local government funding. This put them in a difficult position as their region grappled with recovering from Cyclone Gabrielle.
"If we are to attempt to drive demand but also look through a lens of regeneration, then we need extra resources to do so."
These plans were not just aimed to make the different areas better for visitors, they were designed to make the communities better places to live and leveraging the visitor economy to help them to do that, he said.
With close to 30 different destination management plans, he said there was also a need for a national plan to consider the ongoing value of tourism to communities and the economy.
Tourism Minister Peeni Henare confirmed the government would look into possibly topping up the coffers for destination management plans further.
"It's going to take the council, tourism operators, community and everyone in those destination management planning exercises to contribute and to be able to deliver on the destination management plan. Of course, central government does have a role in that," Henare said.
"There are exciting opportunities there. But we're also realistic about some of those plans. The aspiration is huge and it's awesome because we've encouraged that to come out in their plans.
"But it's going to take some time to build towards those and it isn't - using the good old cricket analogy - it's not about hitting a six every ball. Sometimes you've got to accumulate runs on the board."
