Established: 2013

Location: Wellington

Contact Name: John Barry

Website: www.captours.co.nz

Business mission and vision:
We showcase Wellington and beyond with the personal touch. When you tour with Captours the day is all about you.

“We offer a range of personalised tours to visitors to the Wellington region.”

We specialise in smaller tours travelling in luxury 4WDs. When a customer books with Captours we can customise their tour to make sure they get the most out of their time in Wellington.
Trip Advisor Certificate of Excellence 2017 and Qualmark Silver Award 2018 and 2019.
After 30 plus years in banking working for big institutions, the time was right to become my own boss and pursue my passion of showing off our fine city to visitors.
I was not at all Social media savvy so faced a daunting learning curve to get up to speed with the latest developments in this fast moving space.
The seasonality of the tourism business is easily underestimated. Most of the visitors to Wellington come in spring/summer. However, we worked hard to make connections with those offering winter attractions in the Capital. This led to us providing Craft Beer tour to those in town for Beervana, Martinborough Wine tours to WOW attendees and Foody tours to Wellington on a Plate afficinados.
Obtaining access to the lucrative cruise ship market was difficult with numerous hoops to overcome to even establish contact with some of the big cruise ship lines. We concentrated instead on working tirelessly on our tours and exceeding our customers expectations, to produce a quality product in the Wellington tourism market. Over time Captours reputation was enhanced, which led to a big Miami based tourism provider, Shore Excursions getting in touch with us to provide tours for their customers while they are in port in Wellington. We have just completed our 200th tour for this company with a full book of tours in place for the 2019/20 cruise ship season.
Revenue has increased year on year and the company is now well paced to meet the challenges ahead with tourist numbers expected to level out after a period of sustained growth.
Establishing a quality product in the competitive Wellington tourism market that has provided our customers with a great experience while visiting our city.
We have four contract Guides on our books.
We provide tour famils as well as OSH and First Aid training for our contractors.
I love being my own boss after many years working for others. Also the satisfaction of building a successful business form the ground up is also very rewarding.
We have provided numerous Tour Vouchers to local charities and Sports Clubs over the last 6 years. The latest being a Craft Beer tour for 4 which was 2nd prize in the recent annual Wellington United football club raffle.
We were awarded a Sustainable Tourism Business Award by Qualmark for having a real focus on continuously improving our environmental performance.

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