Te Pā Tū shares Māori culture through storytelling, cuisine, performance, and hospitality. Owned by Tauhara North No. 2 Trust, a Māori land trust, the organization’s purpose goes beyond tourism: creating opportunities for its people while sustaining Māori stories, culture and identity for future generations.
That purpose shaped Te Pā Tū's transformation. After the Trust acquired the former Tāmaki Māori Village shortly before the pandemic, the team used the tourism pause to rethink what the business should become. Rather than return to a model that welcomed around 100,000 visitors a year, Te Pā Tū cut annual numbers to about 39,000, doubled its retail price, and created a smaller, more personal experience built around cultural connection.
For Tiaana Anaru, Sales and Marketing Manager at Te Pā Tū, the challenge is taking that Māori vision to a bigger international audience without losing control of its story.
"GetYourGuide allows us to sit alongside leading visitor experiences all around the world," she says. "It gives us scale and distribution while allowing us to retain ownership of our narratives and storytelling."
GetYourGuide has helped Te Pā Tū introduce its new brand to travelers across the UK and Europe, capture last-minute demand and develop new products, while the team protects the capacity of its signature evening experience.
We spoke with Tiaana about moving from volume to value, creating more year-round opportunities for its people, and growing internationally on Te Pā Tū's own terms.
How does Māori ownership shape what success means for Te Pā Tū?
Te Pā Tū is owned by Tauhara North No. 2 Trust, an ahu whenua trust, or Māori land trust. Its vision is grounded in using our lands and resources responsibly and creating benefits for future generations.
For Te Pā Tū, that purpose comes to life through tourism. We share the richness of Māori culture through storytelling, indigenous cuisine, performance and hospitality, while also creating employment, commercial returns and opportunities for our people.
Our aim isn't simply to operate a successful visitor experience. We want tourism to sustain our stories, our people, our culture and our identity, and create a legacy that future generations can be proud of. We want Te Pā Tū to be an operation that gives more than we take.
How did you rebuild the experience around human connection?
COVID gave us the chance to stop and think about what we actually wanted Te Pā Tū to be. We reduced annual visitor numbers to around 39,000, doubled the retail rate and intensified what was offered as part of the experience.
Today, our signature evening experience is almost at capacity, and we don't want to increase it. Our experience is about being premium, intimate, and personal. Adding more people could jeopardize that.
Our experiences are people. Guests might arrive expecting a performance and food, but they often leave talking about the warmth of our people, the personal conversations they had, and the feeling of being welcomed into our home. Technology helps us create efficiencies and simplify things, but the experience itself is human connection.
How does GetYourGuide help you share Māori culture on your own terms?
One of my main missions at Te Pā Tū is changing how Māori culture is presented to the world. I remember a guest once asking whether we still ran around in grass skirts. A lot of older tourism imagery showed Māori culture through traditional clothing and village settings, and that can leave people with the idea that our culture is fixed in the past.
We want our stories to change that thinking. Yes, traditional clothing is part of our culture, but Māori culture is living and evolving. We wear clothes, we live in houses, and we have evolved.
GetYourGuide has helped us present Te Pā Tū to a global audience in a way that makes it easier for independent travelers to find, understand and book the experience. That was particularly important when we transitioned from the well-known Tāmaki Māori Village name to Te Pā Tū.
It has also opened doors beyond our traditional UK and Australian markets. We're now seeing travelers from smaller European markets that we didn't really see before. With our own marketing budget, reaching all those international travelers would be difficult.
For us, GetYourGuide gives us scale and distribution while allowing us to retain ownership of our narratives and storytelling.
How has GetYourGuide helped shape the guest experience?
One challenge we'd had for a long time involved our transfers. We have a pickup time and an experience start time, and guests sometimes confused the two. During peak season, when we could have 100 to 200 people arriving each day, up to 30% could be late or waiting in the wrong place. That created a lot of stress for our reservations team.
We spoke to GetYourGuide about it. They talked our team through some changes we could make to the listing, particularly around how the pickup and start times were presented.
Those changes took away the problem for our GetYourGuide guests. It might seem like a small thing, but those are the things that really make an operational difference.
That's what I value most about the relationship. If we have a challenge or want to improve performance, I can pick up the phone and get practical recommendations quickly.
How do you use GetYourGuide reviews to improve?
Reviews are one of the most important things for us. Because we offer seasonal programs, we look closely at positive and negative feedback when we're planning what comes next.
A good example is our winter dining experience. We kept seeing feedback on GetYourGuide saying we offered too much food. We used to serve it course by course, and guests wouldn't necessarily realize how many courses were still coming.
We changed that this winter. Now we bring the dishes to the table together as a big reveal, with smaller portions initially and more available if guests want it. They can see what is coming and enjoy everything at their own pace.
We've made smaller changes from reviews too. Guests told us it could get too cold outside in winter, so we brought in blankets and added more fires throughout the experience.
Would we have made all those changes without the feedback coming through GetYourGuide? Probably not. We have our own feedback forms, but much of what we hear from guests comes through OTAs.
What does growth look like when you don't want to increase capacity?
We're almost at capacity with our evening experience during peak periods, so growth for us isn't about putting more people into that experience. We want to protect what makes it genuine, warm and personal.
The opportunities are around daytime products, quieter seasons and different types of experiences. We've already launched daytime offerings, we're developing private and exclusive products, and we're looking at markets including Japan and Korea.
That also gives us an opportunity to create more year-round employment. We can have around 80 employees in summer and around 40 in the quieter season. Going from 80 people to 40 doesn't really help our people. We want to balance that out and create opportunities that allow more of them to stay with us throughout the year.
So when I think about success over the next two or three years, it's a stronger commercial and distribution mix, more year-round employment and development opportunities for our people, greater international recognition of Te Pā Tū, and continued investment in our cultural capability and product quality.
What advice would you give to other operators considering GetYourGuide?
I wouldn't look at an OTA as simply another booking platform. I'd think of it as another way for people to find your business. GetYourGuide has opened our doors to international travelers and markets that may never have found Te Pā Tū otherwise.
Like any partnership, it takes time to invest. Treat it as a partnership, not just a listing. Build a relationship with them, ask questions, invest in great imagery, keep your content fresh, and respond to reviews.
For us, that relationship has helped us reach more travelers from around the world while staying focused on our main goal: keeping Te Pā Tū small, personal, and premium, and protecting the people and culture at the heart of the experience.
Key Takeaways
- Define growth on your own terms. Te Pā Tū reduced annual visitor numbers from around 500,000 to 39,000, choosing a smaller, premium model that puts Māori values, cultural connection, and long-term impact ahead of volume.
- Protect ownership of your story as you expand. GetYourGuide helps Te Pā Tū reach international travelers while the Māori-owned business retains control over how it presents its culture, identity, and stories.
- Build the experience around what guests remember. Te Pā Tū deliberately limits capacity because personal conversations, warmth, and human connection matter more to guests than serving the largest possible numbers.
- Use guest feedback to keep improving. GetYourGuide reviews have directly shaped the experience, from redesigning winter dining to adding blankets and fires in response to guest needs.
- Create growth that benefits your people. Rather than adding capacity to its signature evening experience, Te Pā Tū is developing daytime, seasonal, and premium products that can support more year-round employment and continued investment in Māori culture.
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