“Something slightly went wrong between the time they confirmed my internship and the day I arrived because the HR manager had left and the team I was meant to join didn’t know I was coming,” she explains.
Ferreira was rotated within various departments for four of her six-month internship, spending the last two with the event coordination team, where she anticipated her entire placement would be. The hiccup proved beneficial, giving her broader insight into the business events industry and a job offer.
Following a promotion to the international sales team at Cape Town International Convention Centre, she was able to do the work she enjoyed most: destination marketing. Moving her way up to manager of the international sales team, she and her husband decided the time was right to travel. Not knowing where they wanted to go, she said it was her then-CEO who offered invaluable advice.
“His advice was to find a place where people don’t know what you know; where you’re the one adding value to the conversation,” she says.
Knowing little about the destination, she applied for an international sales role at the Qatar National Convention Centre, joining the team in the venue’s pre-opening period. From there she moved to Abu Dhabi before finding herself in New Zealand in January 2020, bringing with her a wealth of international knowledge, just before the pandemic.
She says every place she’s worked has allowed her to experience a new market. Cape Town offered long-established conference business out of Europe and a strong process environment.
“Qatar…was the complete opposite,” she says. “There was no conference market. [There had] never been a convention centre. There wasn’t a convention bureau; that didn’t exist.
“Forming an association in the Middle East was illegal,” she explains, “so to try and bid for an international conference, when you needed a national association was almost impossible.”
She says it forced adaptability, strategic planning and lots of creative workarounds, forming regional committees that incorporated other regions with a legal body to secure business. It also included managing everything solo without the help of a convention bureau, from bidding to organising famils and securing deals with hotels and airlines.
“Going from a very easy sell to a very hard sell, you learn a lot through that,” she says.
The process served her well when moving to a bureau later on.
She compares selling a destination like Wellington to her experiences selling Abu Dhabi.
“Everybody knows Dubai and so we were kind of the underdog even though we were the capital city. We weren’t the city people associated with the Middle East or with the UAE.
“And so coming to Wellington, there’s a similarity in some way because people look at New Zealand and think of Auckland in the conference market – Wellington potentially not so much because historically, we’ve not had a convention centre and therefore, we probably didn’t tap into all those international conferences that could have come to the city.”
Now, of course, the city has its first purpose-built convention centre Tākina, which opened in June 2023.
Ferreira says many international stakeholders are surprised to learn Wellington is New Zealand’s capital.
“People assume it’s Auckland and it was the same in the UAE. They assumed Dubai was the capital because it was the big smoke.”
But with Wellington as the capital, she says it allows significantly greater access to government figures in greater numbers for events.
“If you want the right decision makers at your event, this is going to help you. They don’t need to get on a plane [and] there could be 15 of them as opposed to two.”
She says that the “two-degree separation” of the city also allows for greater connectivity between planners, key industry leaders and organisations.
“Getting to the right government agency or organisation or CEO or research institute or Dean of the Faculty is easier because of the sheer size of the population and the connectedness of the place. There’s this energy in Wellington … I don’t know how to describe it. We often talk about it because it’s hard to put your finger on but there is this energy here where people want to make a difference.”
From a delegate connectivity perspective, she says Wellington’s walkability is also a big bonus; the entire city is accessible within a 30-minute walk. With a thriving food scene, she says delegates love walking from their hotel to a restaurant, cafe or bar and to bump into colleagues on the street in a truly connected city.
