Small Business Project: Auckland duo turns art, culture into a luxury enterprise for well-heeled travellers
Monday, 6 July 2026
The Small Business Project is a weekly series that shines the spotlight on Kiwi small businesses doing interesting and unusual things in their industries.
Fine Art Tours NZ was born out of a two previous tourism ventures undertaken by Jacqui Wilkinson and partner Chris Daya, one of which was effectively poleaxed by Covid, and the other which has been put into abeyance by the poor state of the domestic economy. But Fine Art Tours - a service providing customised full and half day tours for small groups of mainly American and Canadian tourists who want premium arts, cultural and cuisine experience in the country’s main centres - is going gangbusters, says Wilkinson, as tourism rebounds and North American travellers flock to tick off their bucket lists.
Wilkinson told The Post about how her business was riding the tourism rebound.
What has your venture set out to achieve?
When we started in 2014, there wasn't anything else like it.
How the business actually came to be is a little bit of an interesting story. I was a volunteer at the time with the Festival Friends committee of the Auckland Arts Festival because I had an marketing and advertising background, and I saw an opportunity. As a supporter of the arts, and with an understand of tourism from my other tourism businesses, I thought “we're organizing these incredible experiences for local patrons and local sponsors for the festival. I wonder if we could do that in the international visitor markets too?”
We started doing it - without needing too much by way of investment because when you start a service sector business like this is, you don't have major overheads - you are mainly bringing your time and expertise to the table.
While our name is Fine Art Tours, we don't just do art tours; we do arts and culture. So, for us, that's culinary experiences, art, architecture and design, and New Zealand history as well. We have 30 guides working across Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Wellington, although they are not all full-time workers, and we carry out thousands of tours each year.
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Tourism has had a tough couple of years. How do you characterise the sector now?
It's booming. Tourism is one of the shining lights of the New Zealand economy right now, which is why the current government is lauding us, and you’ve probably seen many reports from the minister of tourism, lots of high fives and excitement about tourism, because we are an export sector, just like agriculture and farming in general.
When tourism and farming are typically up, the rest of the economy is not doing so well, and vice versa. So, at the moment, while everybody's sort of saying it's pretty grim out there, you will find that most tourism operators around New Zealand are having a pretty good time.
Why are Americans and Canadians in particular coming here?
New Zealand's always been a bucket list destination for a lot of visitor markets around the world, Americans and Canadians to a lesser degree, but Americans definitely have New Zealand on their top 10. At the moment, we are seen as a great place to come and perceived as quite low risk.
UK and Europe is in a bit of a doom and gloom patch themselves, so coming all the way Down Under is a little bit of a stretch, especially when a lot of those visitors come through the Middle East. But American clients can come straight to New Zealand - there's huge connectivity between the US and New Zealand - which is very helpful.
What is next for the company?
Just continuing to build on the success that we've already found is our main goal. We’ve got a really solid business now, but it was very, very hard to come back from the pandemic. It's very hard to appreciate what the pandemic actually did to our sector. When the borders closed, it essentially meant that we didn't generate revenue for almost three years.
Starting up again is like going back to the beginning. But we had our experience, we had the existing supplier contracts and things like that; we had a team that were desperate to come back and work for us. So, getting off the ground again in 2023 when the borders reopened and we were able to trade again was the second time around, and it was a lot easier.
That’s probably a core part of our story - we had that time over the pandemic to take a step back and really define what it is we wanted to achieve. Essentially, the business in its current format is only three years old..
In three years where will you be? Could you double the business?
Yes, I think so. With staffing, for example, we don't have to advertise. People come to us, and we have a lot of people coming through referrals, because we have a good name
But just because we could grow doesn’t mean it could happen overnight. Tourism is a hard sector to grow and build in - it’s not like just opening a storefront on Lambton Quay, and hoping people are going to come through the front door. You've got to make international connections, you've got to build and grow those relationships. The US market has a lot of quirks around it. They have to have trust you and relationships can take years to develop and grow.
Is there something you, you wish you'd known before you started in business?
Starting a small business is probably the hardest thing you can do in life after having a family. Having a business has the potential to completely take over your life if you let it. I've never let that happen, but you have to be in the right head space. The personal growth that comes out of it is one of the greatest things - as well as being one of the most difficult.
What’s the most helpful piece of advice you ever received?
Probably one of the best, earliest pieces of advice I received was ‘don't make decisions based on your ego’, which was hugely important, and it’s always stuck with me because I see small business owners doing this all the time. Say, for example, they get a hit of money at the early days, they'll go and spend it on a very big luxury vehicle, or start to buy little toys, or they'll invest in a really expensive office space. Just don't do it! It's only for ego. If you don't need it, don't do it. Save your pennies, because you never know when the next pandemic's going to happen.
If you would like your business to feature in The Small Business Project, email Aimee Shaw at aimee.shaw@stuff.co.nz