ABOUT MY HOME TOWN
There’s nothing quite like getting local tips when you're travelling. Learning about those secret antique dealers off the beaten track, the tourist spots that are actually worth a visit, those memorable cultural experiences and the best place for a coffee or a cocktail can make a great trip into an unforgettable one.
Informed by local knowledge, The My Home Town series was created to support independent businesses and showcase unique experiences around Aotearoa New Zealand, from finding the best second-hand bookstores and vintage boutiques, to discovering quirky mid-century accommodation options and sharing secret entertainment venues. These handy glove box sized guides will satisfy every traveller’s curiosity and help you feel at home when you’re on the road.
Informed by local knowledge, The My Home Town series was created to support independent businesses and showcase unique experiences around Aotearoa New Zealand, from finding the best second-hand bookstores and vintage boutiques, to discovering quirky mid-century accommodation options and sharing secret entertainment venues. These handy glove box sized guides will satisfy every traveller’s curiosity and help you feel at home when you’re on the road.
OUR VALUES
- We strongly support sustainable tourism. We are a member of Tourism Industry Aotearoa and have signed up to their Tourism Sustainability Commitment. You can read more about the initiative here.
- We work closely with local businesses, tourism operators, accommodation suppliers and hospitality outlets and partner with Councils, Economic Development Agencies and Business Improvement Districts around Aotearoa to create the My Home Town guides and ensure that curious travellers get the best from their experience. Locals are the experts and we seek to champion their knowledge and expertise!
- We carefully curate our guides with curiosity and sustainability in mind. While there are many tourism guides on the market that are targeted at mainstream audiences, the My Home Town guides like to explore the more unusual, distinctive side of a place. We focus on out of the ordinary experiences, unique sites of significance, beautiful examples of heritage architecture, boutique retail that focus's on vintage, secondhand, bespoke and Made in New Zealand products, quirky accommodation options and outstanding hospitality offerings that you can't recreate at home and are worth travelling for.
- We have a network of promotional avenues and as we are an independent guide we are able to draw together many disparate strands of the tourism mix right up and down the country and present them as a connected Aotearoa-wide offering. We not only produce the guides, we also love promoting them to our audience of curious travellers who enjoy adventure and discovering new places and experiences all around New Zealand.
- We design our guides with longevity in mind. In keeping with the UN’s sustainability goals of responsible consumption and production, we make sure they are beautiful, useful and something that people will want to keep and share, rather than use once and throw away. While digital technologies have their place, we’re constantly told by our readers that there’s nothing like holding a well-designed guide in your hands and people often pass our guides on to friends and family once they've finished with them which pleases us a great deal.
- We only work with New Zealand based printers to produce our guides. This keeps the money in Aotearoa to support local businesses and ensures that we can keep an eye on the quality and be more responsive with our timings, which can’t happen if products are printed overseas.
- We want everyone to be able to access My Home Town guides so we offer them free of charge. We make them available in retailers, tourist spots, i-SITEs, and accommodation places around Aotearoa. To keep this offer free, our business model relies on the generosity of a range of businesses and institutions and is a mix of advertising sales, sponsorship and local government funding. We are hugely grateful to all of these people as their support means we can keep promoting distinctive and alternative tourism experiences around New Zealand. If you can't get hold of one, we post them out for a small $5.00 fee that covers all postage and packaging costs and helps to fund future editions.
- We like to deepen the My Home Town offering with bespoke events and experiences to accompany our guides that are tailored to each region we work in. This further supports the positive impact that My Home Town can have in an area by working with local tourism operators, artists, performers and hospitality businesses.
