“It’s been awesome. There’s no looking back. We’ve done some pretty cool stuff…don’t know how we’ve done it all in a year,” says McDonald.
The year included attending IMEX America in Las Vegas, appointing a sales representative in USA – “a super important market for us”’ – joining a global DMC alliance and winning a young leader’s scholarship to the global conference for the Society for Incentive Travel Excellence (SITE) in Abu Dhabi.
“In between all that, we’ve delivered six incredible programmes…from full scale, full eventing, right down to some white labelling for some of our partners out of Australia that just needed some extra ground support pretty quickly,” she says.
To celebrate ROAM’s first birthday, at New Zealand’s flagship business events trade show MEETINGS in June, McDonald announced “we are hiring to take on our first event executive to start expanding the team”.
“So business is good and it’s been a busy year.”
Reflecting on that initial leap of faith, McDonald says, “There’s something in that ownership model where the buck stops at you, but it’s so rewarding.”
She and her business partner Jenny Walsh operate from Queenstown and Auckland.
McDonald is most proud of an incentive program she ran for the US-based Club Ichi Network, which she describes as “a collective of event planners and event industry professionals that don’t identify with your standard status quo event like corporates…they are looking for things that are different and want to do things out of the ordinary”.
The May program was called “The Secret Family Reunion with Club Ichi” and included 50 North American event professionals, all part of the Club Ichi community, who purchased a “mystery ticket” to a week-long trip that ended up being New Zealand.
“They had no idea where they were going and we had a full seven days to plan that pushed boundaries, challenged event norms and created magic. And that it was.
“It was all supported and driven by Tourism New Zealand. Such a privilege to be their on-ground DMC partner!” says McDonald.
“We had not only seven days to wow, surprise [and] delight event professionals, which we know [are] the hardest people to surprise…but also try and do that without being able to gather any specific information about the guests and not being able to tell our suppliers necessarily who they are because one search of a name on LinkedIn could ruin the whole secret,” says McDonald.
“So it was challenging but so rewarding.
“We went to different corners of the country,” explains McDonald.
“We did the first commercial night market at Matakana just out of Auckland.
“The All Blacks experience was amazing and then we did a full Eden Park experience.
“We welcomed them by having a local local kaimātua take them for a walk up to the top of Mount Eden and we did a sunrise grounding. So, the first thing they did as they got off the plane wasn’t to go to the hotel.
“We thought differently and took them up there to be connected to place. I had hitchhikers planted on the road out to Glenorchy to make it more interesting. So lots of just little fun quirky things and that’s how we do it.”
