Our Love for Kaikōura and Our Local Community

We consider living and working in Kaikōura a complete privilege and are immensely grateful for what we do and where we get to live and work. Kaikōura, our childhood home, is a place of outstanding natural beauty and home to a stunning variety of marine life. To us working in such a special environment and community comes with deep sense of responsibility.

Our tours are operated under Department of Conservation Marine Mammal Permits and we work hard to work in with what the seals are naturally doing. The seals are not fed, trained or enticed in any way. Our skippers are SMART operator certified.

We work hard to minimise the impacts on the environment by monitoring our operations and continually looking on ways to improve.

Kaikōura is Platinum Certified  Earthcheck Sustainable Community.  EarthCheck is the world’s leading scientific benchmarking certification and advisory group for the travel and tourism industry.  It encourages sustainable travel and tourism. Kaikōura has been a member of EarthCheck for 13 years. 

Our objectives for 2019 and 2020

• Continue to support Kaikōura’s Platinum Certified Earthcheck certification objectives by continuing to reduce, reuse, and recycle waste and monitor and reduce the use of resources when ever possible. 

• Continue to work with customers, employees and community to help educate and reduce the use of single use products which we consider to be a major threat to our ocean environment. Although our waters are remarkably pristine, globally our oceans are suffering from plastic pollution.

• Continue to run our 'Beach and Road-Side Clean Up' programmes to help remove rubbish that has entered our natural environment before it gets washed into our waterways/ocean.

• Inspire and encourage self care and resiliance within our community through encouraging families and individuals to participate in low impact, low cost nature based activities, such as picnics, beach walks and ocean swimming. 

• Promote Tourism New Zealand's Tiaki programme at our premises and through our website. Tiaki means to care for people and place. New Zealanders have a special connection to the land, and want to help visitors travel safely and conscientiously. The Tiaki Promise has a set of guiding principles for visitors to follow, showing them how to contribute to preserving and protecting our land.

• Educate and promote best practice in regard to land based seal approaches by independent visitors visiting the Kaikoura seal colonies.

• Celebrate and encourage our rich local history and culture through the promotion of Maori Language, culture and Tikanga (“the maori way of doing things”) in particular the concepts of Kaitiakitanga - Guardianship or management in relation to natural and physical resources and Manaakitanga - Hospitality, kindness, generosity, support – the process of showing respect, generosity and care for others.