Guidance to Best Practice
Aotearoa New Zealand is known for world-class experiences and services — yet accessibility is too often an afterthought or a baseline standard. As covered in the training modules, Access Guides are your most powerful enabler. They form the foundation of your accessibility and inclusive practice.
Your Access Guide is a living document. As your business grows, so should your guide. It brings transparency to your product, allowing you to appraise your access, services, and overall experience. Our Advisory Team supports this process, helping you identify what can be improved or introduced to enhance both visitor experience and staff satisfaction.
Your Access Guide also includes a section for customer feedback — both positive and constructive. This user insight is one of your most valuable tools for progress. Honest feedback, even when challenging, drives improvement and builds trust.
By using your Access Guide as a framework for staff training and induction, you create a system for continuous learning and growth. Each year, the Adapting Aotearoa team will provide an appraisal of your product. Through comparison and shared learning across the industry, we can collectively lift standards and strengthen inclusive tourism.
When you invest in developing your product, don’t do it alone. We’re here to ensure that your investment creates real impact — moving beyond minimum compliance to deliver total visitor experience.
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It is of high importance to contact your advisory service before any development work begins. Involving us early ensures that design, infrastructure, and planning decisions are future-proof, cost-effective, and aligned with best practice.
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All too often, all it takes is reaching out with a simple question. Too many businesses jump to assumptions or spend valuable time trying to work out solutions on their own. Your adaptive advisory service removes the guesswork, offering straightforward solutions grounded in lived experience and an intimate understanding of the adventure tourism industry. This unique perspective means we can provide practical, effective answers that save time and effort, while ensuring quality and consistency that would be difficult to achieve otherwise.
This is not a tick-box exercise or something that can be achieved by access specialists without lived experience of disability. True inclusion means valuing your customers, supporting their independence, and enhancing the quality of every experience.
Often, simple lateral thinking or temporary adaptations can make an experience possible. But if you truly believe in Adapting Aotearoa, you’ll invest in your product. Every business evolves — and this is the time to move beyond government standards, placing real value on your customers’ experience through best practice.
We’ve long lived in a “them and us” society. It’s time to look beyond bias and focus on what unites us — our shared humanity. Let’s create environments that genuinely reflect society in all its diversity.
The Makingtrax Foundation extends beyond the built environment. If your experience is based in a natural setting, all the better. Accessibility in nature is simpler than many believe — it just takes experience and understanding. Access and inclusion are relative to your customer base, your environment, your style, your character, and your resources.
For any new development, connect with our Advisory Service before you begin. And if you choose to work with external advisors, we highly recommend reviewing the Advisory Services module and supporting documentation to ensure alignment with our inclusive framework.
Guidance to Best Practice
Through annual appraisals, customer feedback, and a tailored advisory service, Adapting Aotearoa is designed to strengthen every part of your operation. Each time you develop new infrastructure, experiences, or services, our team helps you move beyond assumptions, baseline standards, and compliance. We support you in building your business around your customers — ensuring every experience is not only possible, but genuinely welcoming and meaningful.