A regional tourism strategy, freed from a PDF.
Destination Queenstown is the regional tourism organisation for one of the world’s best-known destinations. Its Regenerative Tourism plan is the blueprint for the region’s future, and it lived inside a dense PDF on a microsite shoehorned into the main site. We rebuilt it as regenerativetourism.co.nz, designed around what each audience actually came to do.
The brief
We usually advise against full rebuilds in favour of iterative optimisation. This was the exception. The Regenerative Tourism program had a restrictive microsite inside the main Destination Queenstown website, which forced every stakeholder down the same confusing path and buried the strategy itself inside a multi-page PDF.
The goal was not a redesign. It was to fix a broken conversion funnel: stop losing engaged visitors, make the strategy readable, and turn visitors into informed, supportive stakeholders.
What the research found
The PDF was where engagement went to die. Anyone who wanted to understand the plan had to download a file. The information existed, but it was inaccessible, and the drop-off showed it.
There was no path for anyone in particular. Local operators, council and government partners, and community members each had a different job to do, and all of them were pushed down one route that suited none of them. The constrained parent-site layout could not build a narrative or guide people to what mattered to them.
The approach
Before any design work, we rebuilt the information architecture using the jobs-to-be-done framework, mapping the primary task for each audience into its own clear path. Moving the program to its own domain was the first step that made those paths possible.
We treated the PDF as a conversion blocker and removed it. The strategic material was synthesised, rewritten for the web, and surfaced in short scannable sections, so a high-effort download became a low-effort read.
To de-risk the build, we produced a full clickable prototype in Figma and tested the new flows with stakeholders before a line of code was written. It caught the rework early and got everyone aligned on the answer.
The result
Engagement and time on page rose once visitors could find and read what they came for. Operators, partners and the community each got a clear route to their task.
The editor-friendly CMS lets the team publish progress updates, projects and stories without a developer, which is what keeps a strategy site alive after launch. Two years on, the site is still the program’s home and we still maintain it.
What actually moved
- A dense strategy PDF replaced with scannable on-page content.
- Dedicated paths for operators, partners, community and visitors, built from jobs-to-be-done research.
- A standalone domain and CMS the DQ team publishes to without a developer.
- Clickable Figma prototype validated with stakeholders before build.
“Impact were instrumental in bringing our vision for regenerativetourism.co.nz to life. Their expertise in web design and UX helped us transform our Destination Management Plan into an accessible, user-friendly digital platform. What stood out was their ability to translate complex strategic content into a clear, engaging website that serves diverse stakeholders, from local businesses to visitors.”
Other programs, other results.
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