Prepared for Carrington Estate · Karikari Peninsula
The rest arrive through booking platforms that charge you 15–20% for the privilege of introducing you to guests who were already looking for you.
That gap is the single most recoverable thing in your marketing — and it is the first thing this proposal fixes.
The gap, in numbers
Where you stand today
Three thousand acres. Four kilometres of private white-sand coastline. A championship course designed by Matt Dye. An award-winning estate winery, three dining venues, and twenty-three villas and lodge rooms. There is nothing else like this in the Far North.
None of that is visible where your guests are looking. Every figure below was measured directly during the week of this proposal.
Guests booking a golf and wedding destination check ratings before they check availability. A three-star average intercepts them at the final step — and it suppresses the conversion rate of every other channel you run.
| Property | Rating | Reviews |
|---|---|---|
| Carrington Estate | 3.0 / 5 | 298 |
| Rosewood Kauri Cliffs | 4.0 / 5 | 323 |
The review volume is almost identical. The rating differs by a full star. This is not a problem of exposure — guests are finding you and then telling each other what they found. What they praise is the course, the setting and the kitchen. What they criticise is arrival, upkeep and dated rooms.
What we found on the site
Every one of these was verified page by page.
The page is titled “Karikari Penincula Accommodation”. This is the text Google displays in search results, on the page that sells your rooms.
The Lodge Rooms page carries a description of the villas. The Villas page carries a description of the Lodge Rooms. A guest searching for a lodge room clicks through and reads about a three-bedroom villa — then leaves.
We checked Weddings, Venue Hire, Events and Accommodation. None states a guest capacity, a room count, a floor plan or an indicative price. Capacity is the first question every wedding planner and event booker asks. At present your website cannot answer it.
Structured data — the code that tells Google you are a hotel, a restaurant, a golf course, a wedding venue — exists only on your homepage. Golf, Accommodation, Dining, Winery, Weddings, Events, Venue Hire and Membership have none. This is what qualifies you for rich search results and for citation by AI assistants when travellers ask them for recommendations.
Your own website still links to the old Peppers Carrington Resort Facebook address, and New Zealand’s official tourism site still lists your golf course under that former name. Reviews, links and search authority are being split between two identities.
The strategy
Your occupancy sits near 40%, and the guests who do stay largely self-cater. They occupy beds without touching the restaurants, the winery or the course. Filling more beds with the same kind of guest does not solve that.
A single wedding does three things at once.
All 23 villas and lodge rooms, on an off-peak weekend, in one booking.
Catering and bar for eighty guests — many multiples of what a self-catering family spends.
Guests who have never stayed with you experience the property. A share of them return.
Your twenty-three villas and lodge rooms sleep approximately eighty-five people — which maps almost exactly onto the New Zealand average wedding of 80–120 guests. The figures below use published 2026 national benchmarks for a catered estate — a venue with its own kitchen and licence, which is what you are. Accommodation is priced from your own published rates.
| Revenue line | 60 guests | 80 guests | 100 guests |
|---|---|---|---|
| Venue hire | 5,000 | 8,000 | 8,000 |
| Catering | 6,000 | 10,400 | 15,000 |
| Bar and wine — from your own winery | 2,400 | 4,000 | 6,000 |
| Guest accommodation, two nights | 7,560 | 11,900 | 11,900 |
| Next-day golf and tastings | 800 | 1,600 | 2,400 |
| Total to the estate | ≈ 21,800 | ≈ 35,900 | ≈ 43,300 |
Benchmarks: catered-estate venue hire ≈ $8,000; plated dinner $90–160 per person; beverage packages $30–70 per person; bar tabs commonly $30–60 per person. Accommodation from your own published rates. Everything that follows in this proposal is modelled on the conservative 60-guest case (≈ $21,800), not the mid case — we would rather set a bar you can clear than one that flatters the proposal.
Every competing Northland venue clusters around Kerikeri, Russell and the Bay of Islands — roughly three hours from Auckland. You are ninety minutes beyond them. You will never win on convenience, so we will not try.
Instead: the garden venues have no accommodation. The farm venues require a hired marquee. The luxury lodges cannot sleep eighty people. Carrington is the only property in the Far North that can hold a ceremony, a reception, eighty beds, a private beach, a golf course and a working winery on one title.
Guests have to stay the night anyway. So the offer becomes the whole weekend, exclusively yours — which is precisely what a venue three hours closer to Auckland cannot sell.
| Search term | Monthly searches | Cost per click | Competition |
|---|---|---|---|
| carrington estate | 2,400 | $1.11 | Medium |
| kerikeri accommodation | 1,300 | $2.30 | High |
| bay of islands accommodation | 1,000 | $2.35 | High |
| wedding venue new zealand | 880 | $1.51 | Medium |
| northland accommodation | 320 | $2.27 | High |
| northland wedding venue | 210 | $1.23 | Low |
| wedding venues northland | 210 | $1.23 | Low |
| luxury lodge northland | 140 | $1.81 | High |
| golf courses northland | 110 | — | Low |
| new zealand golf resort | 90 | $0.97 | Medium |
The wedding terms carry roughly 1,300 searches a month at $1.23–1.51 a click with low competition — the best value in the entire set. Golf, by contrast, draws only ~470 searches a month and several terms attract no advertisers at all. Golf is your differentiator and your best content; it is not your traffic source, and we will not spend your budget as though it were.
The plan · August, September, October
Northland’s season peaks from December to February, and weddings from November to March. This programme is built to land at full strength exactly when your market arrives.
Today all six share one weak homepage. Each gets a page built to be found and to convert — with the capacity, floor plans, photography and indicative pricing that are missing today.
Spending at full rate in August — into low season, before the new site is live — sends paid traffic to a page that cannot convert it. We recommend starting deliberately small.
| Month | Meta (Reels) | Total | Focus | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| August | 1,000 | 500 | 1,500 | Brand defence only |
| September | 2,500 | 2,500 | 5,000 | New site live; weddings open |
| October | 3,000 | 3,000 | 6,000 | Full rate |
| Initial three months | $12,500 | |||
| November | 3,500 | 3,500 | 7,000 | Continuation — wedding and summer booking season |
| December | 4,000 | 4,000 | 8,000 | Continuation — peak |
Advertising is paid by you directly to Google and Meta — it never passes through our account. Campaign planning, creative and optimisation are charged at 6% of media spend (see Investment below). November and December are shown because that is when your season arrives; they are not part of the initial commitment.
The return
We would rather show you the bar you have to clear than forecast revenue we cannot yet calculate. Once you share your actual package value and margin, this becomes precise.
Total investment · initial three months
| Setup fee, including the complete website rebuild | waived |
| Monthly service, $4,500 × 3 | 13,500 |
| Advertising management, 6% of media spend | 750 |
| Advertising, paid direct to Google and Meta | 12,500 |
| Total | 26,750 |
The website rebuild would ordinarily be a $12,000 engagement on its own. It is included at no separate charge, and it remains a durable asset long after this period.
What it takes to break even
| Weddings booked | Net position |
|---|---|
| 0 | −18,000 |
| 1 | −2,700 |
| 2 | +12,500 |
| 3 | +27,800 |
| 5 | +58,300 |
Modelled on the conservative 60-guest wedding (≈ $21,800), $12,500 of additional room revenue over the period, and a 70% incremental margin. At the mid-case 80-guest wedding, a single booking clears the bar. Excludes the compounding value of the website, content, rankings and improved reviews, which keep producing afterwards at no further cost.
One honest caveat about timing. Weddings booked between August and October are almost always celebrated between November and March. Within the first three months you should expect to see confirmed forward bookings and deposits — the revenue itself lands across your summer. We would rather say that plainly now than have you measure us against a number that was never going to appear by Labour Weekend.
And a quieter return that does not appear in the table. Every $10,000 of booking you recover from the platforms saves $1,500–2,000 in commission. At $1.11 a click, roughly $600 a month buys back most of your brand search traffic — which alone offsets a large share of the Google budget.
Investment
We charge a setup fee, a monthly service fee, and 6% of advertising spend for campaign management. Everything in the first column below would normally be a $12,000 setup engagement; for Carrington it is waived.
Setup & website rebuild
Normally $12,000 · waived
Monthly service · three-month minimum
NZD, excluding GST · $13,500 for the initial term
Advertising management
$750 across the initial three months, at the schedule above
Advertising spend
Paid by you to Google and Meta — never through our account
Three months is enough to rebuild the site, recover your brand traffic, repair the review position and put wedding and conference enquiries in front of you. It is deliberately a low bar to start.
It is worth being clear about what happens next, though. The three-month term ends on 31 October — roughly four weeks before your season begins. The work done in those three months is the groundwork; the return on it arrives across December to March. If the programme is producing enquiries by late October, stopping there means paying for the foundation and leaving before the building goes up.
There is no lock-in beyond the initial term, and no penalty for stopping. We simply think you should decide that with the timing in front of you rather than behind you.
Being straight with you
Your rating depends on operations, not marketing. Guests are writing about arrival, upkeep and dated rooms. We can respond to every review, generate fresh ones and surface what you do well — but the underlying experience is yours to change. We will treat rating improvement as a shared goal, not a unilateral promise.
Revenue follows your season, not our calendar. Ninety days from August lands in late October. By then we expect clear movement in traffic, rankings, enquiries and reviews. Revenue arrives with your December-to-March peak, and some wedding bookings taken this year will be celebrated next year.
Corporate buyers do not arrive through search. There is effectively no search volume for conference venues in Northland. That segment has to be reached through direct outreach and event-planning partners, which we will run alongside the paid programme rather than pretending advertising alone will find them.
To begin
Nothing in this proposal requires you to take our word for it. Every figure was measured, and every claim is checkable. The first campaign — recovering your own name from the booking platforms — can be live within a week of your go-ahead.