“The electrification of tourism is not only great for decarbonization, but it still can stimulate a whole lot of more money flowing back to the communities.” — Rod Drury 

At a time when governments and local bodies often struggle to fund essential and sustainable infrastructure, the private sector can step in to drive meaningful change for the public good. Rod Drury, serial entrepreneur and founder of Xero, is doing just that in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Since stepping back from his roles as CEO and Director at Xero, a successful tech company, Rod has turned his focus towards ambitious electrification projects in Queenstown. Viewing the city as a testbed for bold ideas, he is leveraging its affordable hydroelectric power to drive progress in energy production, public transport, and marine technology. Rod sees this as an opportunity to showcase the potential of electrification while demonstrating how these innovations can be scaled to larger urban areas.

By attracting private investors interested in long-term, infrastructure projects, Rod’s approach ensures that capital stays local and can be reinvested into community initiatives. Reflecting on this strategy, he says, “I think the key is picking a few small wins to test the system, to build the culture. And then things get bolder, people get more confident and you can actually change to a more innovation-friendly culture.”

This episode, you’ll also learn:

• What public transportation alternatives are on the horizon for Queenstown.
• How an electric wake surf boat links tourism with tech innovation.
• How Rod’s bigger vision for electrification benefits the public.
• Advice for other business leaders looking to make an impact where it matters.

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Show notes

Xero — A cloud-based accounting software company designed for small businesses. 

Zoox — A subsidiary of Amazon that’s developing autonomous vehicles that provide mobility as a service.

Episode transcript

Rod Drury: There’s serious stuff to do on the infrastructure, but if we can build fun things that get people excited it’ll cause you to connect the dots in those stories. And it becomes this theme of using Queenstown as a bit of a test lab. The business case won’t be, you know, all done by solving our traffic problems, it’s using us as an example of what can be done, and it can be scaled to larger cities.

David Archer: Welcome back to Travel Beyond where we partner with leading destinations to bring you inspiring solutions to the greatest challenges facing communities and the planet. I’m David Archer from Destination Think, recording from Haida Gwaii, the territory of the Haida Nation off the north coast of British Columbia in Canada.

We look at the role of travel on this show and choose to highlight destinations that are global leaders. We talk to changemakers who are addressing regenerative travel through action in their communities and often from the bottom up, and as always, we are actively looking for the best examples of efforts to regenerate economies, communities, and ecosystems.

So reach out to us. If you have a story to share, you can send that to me directly at david at destination think. com. Last week we heard all about the Creating Equitable Destinations report from the Travel Foundation, and Destination Think is a partner and sponsor for that project. The report is expected to release the same week as this podcast episode, so you can head over to thetravelfoundation.org.uk to access that report for free. Another of our recent conversations comes from Queenstown in Aotearoa, New Zealand. And Queenstown has featured heavily on this podcast before, as you might know, especially for its community’s leadership towards decarbonization and setting the goal to reach carbon zero by 2030 in the visitor economy.

Rod Drury is a successful tech entrepreneur and Queenstown resident, and he’s known for founding Xero, that’s X E R O. A cloud based accounting software company. Uh, but after a decades long career, including about 16 years leading that company, he has stepped back from full time work at Xero, but not quite retiring, I would say instead, he’s begun to turn his attention towards, um, ambitious electrification projects.

And as a guy with resources and connections from his business career, he’s thinking about the big picture while working on tactical innovations. In this interview, he outlined several projects he’s involved with, such as solving traffic problems through public transport and gondolas, electrifying the local marina and other transportation, and decarbonizing ski resorts.

He’s even building an electric wake surf boat, which I had not heard of before, but he says that this could turn every lake into a surf park while creating a new visitor experience. He says that projects like these, as part of a larger electrification vision, can help Queenstown to decarbonize and also save communities money.

He sees the area as a testbed for innovations, and in this chat he brings a little advice for other leaders who also want to accelerate actions toward electrification or other decarbonization efforts. One thing that stood out to me in this is the way he talks about connecting all of these disparate projects together to tell a bigger, meaningful story that supports a vision that people will get excited about, and one that benefits the public too.

So I found that quite interesting. What follows here is a condensed version of the conversation we published as part of this year’s 24 hours of travel innovation. That’s an event that happened on world tourism day where this talk was one of 24 sessions. All right. And with that, let’s hear from Destination Think’s Rodney Payne speaking with Rod Drury.

Rodney Payne: Hello. My name is Rodney Payne. I’m the CEO of Destination Think, and I’m here for this session with tech entrepreneur and founder of Xero, Rod Drury. Today’s session is about energy and tech innovations, fueling rapid decarbonization. Rod, welcome. It’s fantastic to speak with you again. Our paths crossed during the work we were doing with, uh, Queenstown Lakes and continue.

And I’ve been so impressed with the way that you’re applying yourself to innovation at the intersection of decarbonisation and tourism. And it’s a story that I’m really, um, elated to, to share with other people around the world. Thanks for joining us today. 

Rod Drury: Great to see you again. It’s um, uh, looks like we’re having a rod fest.

Rodney Payne: So you’ve got a background in innovation and perhaps, you know, best known for founding Xero. Can you tell us really quickly what is Xero and what you did there? And then we’ll get into some of the juicy stuff. 

Rod Drury: Yeah, sure. So we’re, um, uh, cloud based small business accounting software. I’ve been going for about 15 years.

So, um, last year we did 1. 7 billion of revenue, Australian ASX listed company, 20 billion market cap. And I think we serve 4 million customers all over the world. So we’re a truly global company that’s grown from our part of the world. It’s a small set of rots in the South Pacific. Um, so we were, um, A challenger, um, going into a lot of those big desktop software, um, in the desktop software space.

And, uh, the big innovation we had was building accounting in the cloud. So, you know, when, when we started Intuit was the biggest in the world, um, still are in the U. S. We’re bigger than them in most countries now outside of the U. S. So a technology change allowed us to do something really in scale all over the world.

So I think we’ve got 5, 000 staff now and, um, it’s a great business. 

Rodney Payne: And so you’ve, you’ve sort of achieved the quintessential, you know, tech founders dream of bootstrapping and building a massive company, exiting and retiring to Queenstown, uh, where you can just mountain bike, but you keep yourself pretty busy.

Can you give us a brief overview of the things that you’re working on in Queenstown? 

Rod Drury: Yeah, sure. So, um, once I stopped working full time, I’m still involved with Xero. I’ve got a product design and stuff, but I’m not on the board anymore and we’ve got a great team in there. So, um, I think, you know, when you have businesses that at the very beginning founders drive it forward, you’re always, you know, very hungry.

Um, innovation is key. Product design is key. And as you get bigger and bigger, it gets much more about people and how you manage, um, you know, having those 5, 000 staff all over the world. So I stepped back from a full time role about five years ago and had this, um, real issue of whereabouts do I live? What, what do I do?

Especially being so goal oriented, goal oriented and work being such a big part of my life. In New Zealand, I still have children here. So wanted to still be in New Zealand. Uh, Queenstown’s a fantastic place where you can play. And, uh, so just before COVID, I started to move down there, spending most of my time there.

And what I discovered there was a whole lot of other like minded people, some people who had had business success and wanted to live somewhere that was pretty special. And, uh, what I love about it being an outdoorsy place is, um, you know, great access to sports. You can hike, amazing mountain biking. We’ve got a, um, a great lake there as well.

And you tend to, you know, when you go into a new community, you want to make some friends and, and make a difference. And I think once you commit to somewhere, you want to make it the best place that it can be. So that was all going well. And then COVID happened, which was a just amazing reset for us in New Zealand.

You know, going back now thinking that we were going to close our borders for two years was just insane. Um, but it was a, you know, for all the hardness and for some of the difficulties that people went through, it was a really special time where I think all of us, and for me, coming to the end of my full time career, I’ve got some time to really reflect and to reset and to really commit to the community that I’m now living in, you know.

So, uh, in order to do something with some real purpose, uh, I’ve always put a lot of thought into, you know, what are the big things we need to work on. And at that point, we were looking at, um, at climate and we had a goal that you helped us through, uh, what is it climate free, uh, uh, sorry, carbon free 2030 is a big ambitious task.

And I think as a, as a business person, You don’t just want to do slogans. You really want to focus on what you actually need to do. What do you need to start doing now to be ready for that time? So a lot of the work that we’ve been doing locally is thinking about, you know, how do we bring that to life in Queenstown, which is known as, as one of those really neat global tourist town where we have many, many more tourists than we have local residents that live there.

We don’t have a bare tax, um, so we don’t have direct funding of tourists coming through. And in New Zealand, we didn’t want tourism to be, uh, to continue as it was, where we had a lot of lower value tourists coming through with really cheap camper vans and doing those sort of things. There was a lot of issues.

We had infrastructure issues, especially around getting electricity in. Uh, we had public transport issues, roading issues, So I think from a business point of view, you start diagnosing what those issues are. And then I think you’re also looking at how technology is going to play out over the next five to 10 years.

The sort of things we’ve been doing is, you know, fixing base infrastructure, how do we get new electricity in, into Queenstown and, you know, and again, tying that with tourism, a really good example is an idea of, um, thickening up because we actually make a lot of our hydro electricity is done in South Bend, very close to where we are.

We’re looking, how do we thicken up the power lines coming through? And one of the key areas we’re actually looking at doing a combined new power cable. Uh, with a, a cycleway. We have lots of, uh, cycle tourism and combining those two, two things and maybe putting a small user pays model, may even pay for the electricity infrastructure.

So we’ve had to be innovative down here on how we leverage in a place that’s a long way from central government, how it has a large number of tourists and there’s a lot of, Our international visitor experience in New Zealand was Queenstown is how do we leverage that we have those tourists coming in?

So we’re even looking at Interventions like why don’t we make all rental cars electric over the next sort of five years or camper vans electric as well Which means then we have a digital connection to all of our tourists And it lifts the electricity demand which allows us to put more investment in our power infrastructure So that’s like a, you know, base bit of infrastructure.

We’re trying to leverage tourism to help us fix. And effectively for us, if we have, um, the lines companies that, uh, get paid effectively, uh, if we convert tourists to electricity, it’s essentially like a debt tax for us, which is super interesting. And then that allows us to build a whole lot of new things.

So looking at fun things we can do with that, um, You know new active types of activities we can do. So one of our, you know, really cool projects we’re doing that we’ve talked about before is uh, i’m building a electric wake surf boat, which could turn every lake into a surf park and the difference between Surfing behind a boat and being in one of those wave pools is you don’t need to be a surfer and have to paddle up and be fit enough to do that and work out how to stand.

You can just get pulled up on a rope and then we usually get people surfing within about 15 minutes. So then quite a bit of fun with that. The modeling we’re seeing, uh, hopefully will be live over our Christmas as a six foot wave face in the lake. So it’s going to be pretty fun. 

Rodney Payne: Okay. I want to talk more before we get into the specifics.

Uh, of the different things you’re working on. After starting a software platform and moving to Queenstown, what drew you to working on decarbonization? Is it altruism? Is it problem solving? And what was sort of the realization or epiphany that pulls you in? 

Rod Drury: I think once you’ve finished full time work, you really do have time, uniquely had time to think about the big problems.

And if you’ve got a few resources, you can make things happen. So you can take the time and go and talk to people, you know, it all becomes about purpose. I think business people are very purpose driven. And if you’re doing a startup, you know, you’re, um, it’s pretty all consuming and you just. Have so much experience around how to solve problems, how to, you know, and, and you can, there’s the, the buck stops with you.

If you want to make something happen, you’ve got to drive it. There’s no one else. You can’t kind of go running to mom or dad. You’re the person who, if there’s any issues. Um, you’ve got a, you know, you are responsible for them. You’ve got to stand in the market. And if you’re a public company in, in New Zealand and Australia, every six months you are standing there.

Every dollar you’ve spent, every dollar you’ve made, you’re very naked in front of the crowd, uh, explaining all those things. So I think that drives quite a lot of, um, well, it drives a real bias to action. And then I think, Those skills are very applicable to solving some of these problems. And what we’re seeing is a lot of organizations.

I mean, no one’s got any money. Most governments don’t have any money. Local bodies certainly don’t have a whole lot of money. So you also need to be a little bit sophisticated around how you fund some of these projects. And you need to find investors around the world that are interested in some of these long term infrastructure projects.

And those are skills that don’t really exist in, um, especially in local government. You might luck out and have a few people that have had that sort of experience, but in business, especially fast growing businesses and listed companies, you’re always dealing with money and you understand the dynamics of having compelling investments that Um, and there is a whole market of, uh, people with funds that need to place money.

So if you can take that thinking and bring it in, bring, bring it into, you know, at a, at a town and region and even country level, there’s some really exciting things that can happen there. I think it’s just comes back to the human, um, human nature. You want to make a positive contribution to all that you do.

And it’s also great fun. 

Rodney Payne: Yeah, and a very big and important problem to be working on. Did you start with the wakeboarding boat? Was that the first thing that you wanted was an electric wake surfing boat? Or did you focus on transmission lines first? And what was the entry point for you? 

Rod Drury: Well, it’s kind of, it’s kind of both.

And I think from a software point of view, you always deal with things at different layers. So we knew there was an issue. We had a fundamental issue of the quantity of electricity. And also physical diversity of supply. We have one line coming in, so if there’s an earthquake, which we do have in New Zealand, we could lose power for, you know, four to six weeks.

So we always knew that was a bit of a constraint, but also if you look at the curves, and I think from a technology point of view, you’re looking at the rise of electrification, we knew that we were going to run out of electricity. And in fact, quite a few of us are still heating our homes and floors with diesel boilers, which is crazy in a place that big.

Generates hydro electricity so cheaply, you know, you kind of know what the infrastructure layers are, but I think you’ve also got to do what are the exciting things that get people really, really buzzing about things and, and, you know, so just being a bit selfish once I discovered wake surfing behind the boat.

Yeah, it’s a pretty neat thing to be able to do. And, uh, but it was crazy to me that, you know, spending 150 bucks of gas every hour, and that we’re flooding these boats with water to make a big wave. So as we’re thinking about, you know, what’s a new tourism, uh, experience that gets people excited, building an electric wake surf boat, where, you know, You know, batteries are heavy, which looks great.

We don’t need to put water into the boat. Uh, we get a quiet runtime and lakes are perfect because they’re A to A journeys. You go out and back. So you start looking at that and we realized that it was technically possible to, um, build a, build a boat and New Zealand’s a nation of boat builders. We’re doing pretty well at the America’s Cup in Barcelona at the moment.

Um, so some of those designers have helped us, um, you know, build something which we think is pretty special. So, um, there’s serious stuff to do on the infrastructure. Yeah. But if we can build fun things that get people excited, it’ll cause you to connect the dots in those stories. 

Rodney Payne: The use case  for an electric wakeboarding boat is a really, really good thing to think about because the weight of batteries becomes the advantage for the experience.

And it’s an example of where. Improving the experience for visitors or people can help a community and one way that’s sort of playing out for you is you’ve got this electric wakeboarding boat and you need somewhere to charge it. And now the community is going to benefit because there’ll be an electric marina that we can use for all kinds of things.

Can you talk a little bit about that project and how the sort of evolution is happening? 

Rod Drury: Yeah, so that’s, you know, where we kind of combine the private and public nature of these things. If we build an example application like the boat, we still need to have this infrastructure. So, um, there’s another entrepreneur, um, in Queenstown that’s built a beautiful marina.

So working, working with them, we’ve been able to fund putting in the public charging infrastructure. And the idea there is if we can, um, you know, one of our sort of climate goals is to electrify marine. So, um, by putting in that infrastructure, we can encourage other people. So we’re looking at four legged ferries for public transport.

In Queenstown, uh, jet boats are a, are a big part of the tourism offering. Obviously, they’re noisy and they burn carbon, so the decarbonization of jet boats make sense. So already we have three different applications for that infrastructure we’re putting in place. What we can also do is charge, um, some of the public transport vehicles or council vehicles by having a place at night where they can charge as well.

So. Again, you can, I think, you have this blended, um, these projects get this blend of doing some good work for public and showing people what can be done, creating almost test labs for other innovations to take place where they may not be as well capitalized, and then also, you know, just creating whole new things.

Rodney Payne: Let’s shift gears to traffic. Now there’s a lot of destinations around the world that have bottlenecks and congestion around passenger vehicles. You know, often one person sitting in a car congestion point, the cracks emerge in the system and, you know, between the airport and Queenstown, that’s one of those bottlenecks.

Uh, you’re also doing some thinking and work with the airport there around autonomous vehicles. Can you, can you talk a little bit about that project? 

Rod Drury: Yeah, so one of our big issues in Queenstown is the, um, just the two way road between the airport and the main part of town. And so we don’t have the, we don’t have the opportunity to put another, to put some extra lanes in.

So again, over COVID, we knew this was one of the big infrastructure issues and, um, most governments wanted to think about infrastructure projects. So we did a bit of a sweep of the market. We looked at autonomous. Taxi driving companies as well. There’s one called Zoox, which, um, the Atlassian founders had invested in.

So we knew them pretty well, but since being acquired by, um, Amazon. So that was interesting. Um, and they’re doing some cool stuff and some of the bigger cities. But for us, um, we knew that would be a long, a long, you know, be quite difficult to get full autonomous taxis in a place like Queenstown. So we ended up looking at some other technologies, found a really interesting one called Gromos, which is for four or five person electric bus pods.

And where they’re different is they’re autonomous, but they operate in a 1. 5 meter wide dedicated lane, which is perfect for, um, our application in, uh, Queenstown. So, you know, still a work in progress because a lot of the government departments don’t have sort of long term strategy tech people looking.

Some of these innovations, they’re still thinking about buses, but buses don’t really work in a resort town where you need to get a young bar worker home at two in the morning and a ski field operator, um, to the mountain bus at sort of 530. Um, so you can’t have drivers or a schedule. It really has to be autonomous.

And, um, these small micro, micro electric mobility is really interesting. So I’m doing quite a bit of work on that. And then again, small town collaborating with the, uh, new airport CEO. There’s some land there that we can potentially use. And it is a process talking to everybody, but I think we’re on a pathway now.

We’ll be able to potentially run an airport to rental car trial to get started. And it becomes a theme of using Queenstown as a bit of a test lab. The business case won’t be. You know all done by solving our traffic problems. It’s using us as an example of what can be done Then it can be scaled to larger cities.

We’re also looking at roadway solutions so there’s some really neat cable car technology down here where the cable is fixed and the motors are in the gondola itself So you get much more scale, a lot of fixed cost, and then you scale it up as you add more, um, more gondolas into the system. And there’s some places we could try that as well.

So try not to pick absolute winners, but, um, you know, if we take Queenstown as a test lab, there’s a number of different solutions we can be trialing and have an integrated solution. And in the end, it all comes down to software and apps that are driving the sort of physics of, of these networks. 

Rodney Payne: You, uh, really, uh, keen on mountain biking.

You’ve done a lot to, to help grow the mountain biking experience down in Queenstown. How, how do you see the potential for, for gondolas or ropeways? To both take traffic off the road and also, you know, continue to enhance that, the access to those trails. 

Rod Drury: Yeah, so that’s a very, um, a very active set of projects at the moment.

So, you know, if you think about it, we have these traffic issues, so you could have new traffic solutions. But if a tourist has to come and rent a car, we’ve kind of failed, right? So, um, a lot of reasons that people rent cars is to get up to the ski fields. And we have a couple of ski fields, um, Remarkables and Coronet Peak, where there’s been, um, you know, talks of, of gondola access, uh, for years.

So, um, Coronet’s got really interesting because of the mountain bike work we’ve done means that the business case for a gondola gets shared over summer and winter. So, um, uniquely that’s stacking up as quite a good, uh, Potential project. So we’ve been working with a couple of, um, right ways vendors to, uh, see what we can do.

And as part of, um, the work we’ve been doing on Coronet, we’ve been doing trails, we’ve been replanting. So we’re trying to re cloak, uh, all of Coronet. And the biking has given access to those, uh, trails. Trails to trapping and have got people excited about nature. So now we don’t really build trails without doing, you know, fantastic planting around them as well.

So having done that work now, we can say, well, if we did build a gondola, there’d be a great, a great usage of that over summer. But that might make the models work still, you know, pretty iffy, but we’re working through that. But the big, big benefit is we get to decarbonize skiing rather than diesel generators or, um, you know, diesel, um, diesel, uh, powered ski lifts.

We’re moving, we’ve moved those to electricity. This is again, more demand. I 12, Um, billion dollars per year on, uh, domestically consumed, uh, oil and gas. A lot of that is for cars and transport. And if we’re using our own electricity, that money gets substituted. And so we’re not just sending oil and gas money offshore.

We’re able to, um, uh, you know, using hydroelectricity, wind, and solar, we’re able to keep that money onshore. So the, the price of a ski ticket, you know, the money flows through and isn’t going out as oil and gas, it’s banked locally, uh, going to lines companies, which is then often spent on community projects as well.

So the electrification of tourism not only does, uh, it’s great for decarbonization, but it still can stimulate a whole lot of more money flying back to the communities. 

Rodney Payne: Yeah, solving problems within transportation and tourism is a massive opportunity for economic development and diversification for places like Queenstown that You know, uh, are currently very dependent on tourism, but have potential to lead and be this test bed, uh, that we’re, we’re talking about.

You also have been a great supporter of organizations like the Manitohuna Foundation, an Indigenous led organization that is restoring the local environment. Does that tie in to the trail, you know, the trail improvements that you were talking about? 

Rod Drury: Yeah, yeah. So I’m an Aitahu, so affiliated with one of our indigenous tribes, and I think in New Zealand we get a real pride of our indigenous background.

And what I love is, um, those, those tribal organizations sort of by definition take a long term intergenerational and custodial view of the land. You always want to leave things better for the next generation. And those are the sort of values that we always used in our own business from zero, even though we were a listed company.

We very much thought long term and, um, thinking about making things better for others and how business can just, just improve lives, you know, creating more jobs, all that good, all those good things. And, um, I think that, um, that, uh, indigenous culture, especially in New Zealand, where it’s so strong, uh, just gives us this amazing value set and forces us to really think about things long term and making things for the next generation.

Rodney Payne: One of the things that I’m continuously reminded of. You know, when I hear examples like these is all of the co benefits of altruism, right? It’s, it’s easy to get lost in politicized words like sustainability or climate change, when really what we’re talking about is solving problems through innovation.

Everything we’ve discussed, everything you’re working on, you know, takes pressure off. People and workforce because vehicles are autonomous or increases the abundance of energy, you know, to reduce the costs or, you know, saves businesses operating costs. What are some of the friction points? that you encounter, whether it’s, you know, politically or legislatively or financially, that if we could, if we could be removing those in places like Queenstown and other similar places around the world, we could go quicker and create more of these examples for others to follow.

Rod Drury: I think probably the hardest thing is there’s been a real lack of vision and leadership in some of the stuff. I think with, with social media, uh, and all those things, it’s very difficult for people to lead, you know, you get shot at, but if you’ve been, uh, you know, if you’ve, if you, if you run a listed company and we were a loss making listed company for many years as we were growing, you know, you get a pretty thick skin, so you’re happy to kind of put yourself out there.

And I think also, um, Retired business people kind of don’t have too much to prove, so they can just go and ask questions and have time to go and make things happen. But I think what I really see is, certainly in our country, we’ve lost a little bit of our vision and our leadership. So, these are great projects where people can see them, they can enjoy them and experience them, you know.

And, uh, and then that starts to bring the culture of why can’t we do things, you know, why can’t we make our local places the best places they can be rather than complaining, actually doing. And, you know, you do have to be a thick skin. You get some negative, negative press sometimes, but, um, usually Once you actually get the chance to talk to people and they realize that, you know, you’re quite reasonable doing things for the right reason.

And hopefully it inspires and gets other, and gets other people to lead. And I think that’s part of it is, is, um, you know, not being passive, leaning in and trying to make things happen. 

Rodney Payne: And we’ve, we’ve seen that with the sort of level of ambition around trying to decarbonize by 2030. You know, if you, if you come out and say, we’re going to reduce emissions by 47 percent by 2030, it gets buried in a drawer and a press release, you know, barely gets picked up.

Whereas there’s people like you talking about this in boardrooms all through the community and others around the world sort of paying attention. And I think the strength of leadership and ambition is definitely a common theme that many people. So, uh, I think that’s a really good example of what we’re sort of yearning for in this moment.

And, uh, something that I hope we can help to support and amplify. 

Rod Drury: Like a really good example, a good example of this would be like a simple policy change, right? Let’s make all rental cars electric. There’s zero downside in that for anybody. The rental car companies reflect their fleets every four years or whatever.

There’s the total cost of ownership of a electric vehicle spread out over a thousand days. It’s rented out You know, there’s no extra cost for them really just for supply. So, you know the time supply gets better and better You’re building a fleet for lower income people. So four years later, you’ve got, you know, affordable electric vehicles They can buy and it just immediately, you know even tourists come in to experience an electric vehicle in a beautiful place like New Zealand It’s a fantastic experience, so you would think that would be an easy policy decision to make, but yet still massive hand wringing around that, you know, it’s tough, but I think we’re getting a little bit of momentum now, some good wins, and again, it’s just great fun driving this change.

Rodney Payne: Well, and it lets you experience an electric vehicle for the first time with very low investment personally too, right? Because you can pay a slight premium to go experience it. And realize that, Oh, it’s actually fun and perhaps even better than the vehicle I drive at home. Maybe that’ll change my purchasing decision on my fleet buying decision.

When I get back to the office, it has the co benefit of creating resilience because you’ve now got a massive. Stack of batteries that you can use during an emergency or in a natural disaster, uh, and plug them into the grid to create, you know, resilience. 

Rod Drury: Yeah, and from a straight tourism point of view, you’ve now got a digital connection to all of your tourists, right?

So you can say, hey, we’ve got, you know, if we know that, you know, on a Tuesday, a particular attraction is looking a bit light, you can send a message to everyone saying, hey, there’s cheap charging and, um, in a cheap hotel at this particular location to a segment and send them over there. So you can actually manage your tourism spend and curate the Uh, what people are doing and seeing to optimize all that for everybody, spread people out around the country.

So there’s a whole lot of really neat benefits from it as well. 

Rodney Payne: Yeah, there are so many opportunities as more of this technology comes online. You know, there are places in the world moving towards electrification of rental flights. And this is one of the superpowers that I think we have within travel in the moment we’re in, is to more quickly surface things like this.

And spread them around for adoption and to try to de risk what policy makers see as, you know, disadvantageous and almost create the fear of missing out by saying, well, they’ve done it over there, we can, we can go quickly now. Maybe you can leave us, uh, with, with an answer to the next question based on everything you’re doing.

And while you’re working on what message or advice do you have for business leaders and governments around the world? 

Rod Drury: Well, again, what I sort of said before, it’s about, I think people really respect a bold vision. So, um, you know, and it doesn’t need to come from within, it can come from your community. So creating an environment where you, you know, get your, your best and brightest and your slight crazies in and get some of those ideas on, and then think about, you know, how that, how that can.

Be, you know, be, be part of a strategic plan, a plan that needs to take 10 or 15 years. You can do these processes in a very accelerated time because everyone’s attention spans are really short. So getting a few small wins first and building a culture of success and driving change, I think is very, very possible.

So like in Queenstown and the assignment that you guys did, but you know, we’ve got the main people that we, Thought would be the thought leaders in, you know, did that brainstorming session, came up with some really good tangible ideas and that then could then start going in as, as part of a plan. But, um, how do you just keep that acceleration and that velocity?

And I think the key is picking a few small wins to test the system, to build the culture and then things get bolder, people get more confident and you can actually change to a more innovation friendly culture. 

Rodney Payne: That’s a great note to finish on. I really appreciate your time today and thank you. And we really want to see solutions like those that, that you’re working on spread.

So, you know, make sure to, to support Queenstown and other destinations that are, that are driving positive change and the businesses like those. So hopefully a lot of people get to experience electric wakeboarding at a hydro and wind powered marina in Queenstown before too long. Come down and play.

Thanks, Rod.

David Archer: This has been Travel Beyond presented by Destination Think, and you just heard Rodney Payne speaking with Rod Drury in Queenstown. For more resources and show notes, visit the blog at DestinationThink.com. This episode was produced and has theme music composed by me, David Archer, Lindsay Payne, Jamie Sterling, and Corey Price provided production support.

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