Funding has been granted to a range of Wānaka events as part of the Southern Lakes Regional Events Fund second round, which allocated $1,975,055 overall.

Wānaka events which will receive funding include the Wānaka Dash, Wānaka Beer Festival, Challenge Wānaka Festival of Triathlon and Challenge Wānaka Multi, Motatapu, Ripe, Aspiring Conversations, Warbirds Over Wānaka, NZ Mountain Film & Book Festival, and the Festival of Colour.

The events will be held between October 2021 and April 2023.

The Regional Events Fund (REF) includes the Queenstown, Wānaka and Central Otago areas and is managed collectively through the Southern Lakes Events Investment Panel.

The events that secured funding are collectively set to attract more than 100,000 out-of-region visitors, delivering an additional 216,000 bed nights and $48 million in visitor expenditure to the wider region, panel chair Murray Strong said.

Murray said the panel was very impressed with the calibre of events that applied and the strong focus on event growth and capability building.

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“It’s very exciting to announce another 25 events that will be running across the wider region between now and April 2023. It has been great to see the focus on event growth which has been enabled by the REF funding, as well as capability building across event infrastructure, marketing and event performance and professionalism.”

He said the REF funding has attracted new events and enabled more to be launched, including ones which align with core tourism sectors, such as new biking and food and beverage events.

Success of the REF funding is measured via economic, social, and sustainability criteria with weighting towards the economic benefit that events bring, to replace the loss of international visitors to the Southern Lakes region, Murray said.

The panel is focused on developing a balanced events portfolio of small, medium and large-scale events to provide compelling reasons to visit the wider region year-round.

The fund is part of the government’s $50 million Regional Events Fund which aims to stimulate domestic tourism by supporting events. It is designed to stimulate travel between regions through holding events and helping to replace some of the spend lost from international tourists because of Covid-19.

The Southern Lakes Regional Events Fund is shared between Destination Queenstown, Lake Wānaka Tourism, and Tourism Central Otago.

The third and final round of event grants will be distributed in January and February next year. Find more information here.

PHOTO: Andy Woods