A new tour at Pearl Harbour allows visitors to hear and see (or at least visualise) the 7 December 1941 attack like they have not been able to before.

The Top of the Tower tour is the latest drawcard to the Pearl Harbour Aviation Museum and gets guests 15 storeys above the ground (via a small elevator built in the 40s and some narrow stairs).

Both the trade and consumers have quickly responded to the relaunch of services between Auckland and Honolulu, with the first Hawaiian Airlines flight out of AKL on Monday night full and a major agents’ initative coming up seeing big demand.

Darragh Walshe, of Hawai’i Tourism in New Zealand, says the Aloha Downunder event scheduled for 29 August in Auckland is ‘basically sold out’.

The Emerald Isle has shown that is ready to once again to welcome Kiwis following the attendance at the Meet the Buyer trade event in Meitheal  (Killarney) by Tourism Ireland’s NZ rep Darragh Walshe and Innovative Travel’s Robyn Galloway.

‘It was also important to show the Irish industry that New Zealand is now opening up again,’ says Walshe. ‘We were particularly happy to be able to host Robyn at the Meitheal event for the first time. Her enthusiasm for the breadth of product and the opportunities for the New Zealand market was plain to see – especially by the tourism board and government heads.

Destination representation company and airline GSA, The Walshe Group, is celebrating 45 years in business this month. The commemoration is more poignant as travel restrictions start to ease across Australia and New Zealand.

The company was founded in 1976 by Rodney Walshe. Forty-five years later the company has more than 75 employees and a current client roster that includes Hawai‘i Tourism Authority, Visit Flanders, Experience AlUla, Visit Okinawa, Delta Air Lines, South African Airways, Lufthansa Group, ANA and in the New Zealand market China Airlines, Etihad Airways and Tourism Ireland.

Waiheke Island became the island of Ireland, just for one day, late December. Tourism Ireland hosted a group of about 20 from the trade to the Hauraki Gulf destination on an itinerary that sought to replicate some of the experiences that clients would normally visit on the Emerald Isle. Tourism Ireland’s New Zealand representative, Darragh Walshe, encouraged participants to think of tasting freshly harvested Galway Bay oysters on the Wild Atlantic Way and experiencing the history, heritage and culture in Ireland’s Ancient East. There was a touch of Game of Thrones, much of which was filmed in Northern Ireland, and experiences which resonated of the flavours, music and characters in Ireland’s Hidden heartland.

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