Renowned Queenstown Holiday Park receives platinum recognition

The team at Queenstown’s most environmentally conscious holiday park is celebrating news of a world-beating Platinum EarthCheck award.

Queenstown’s Top 10 Holiday Park Creeksyde is the first holiday park in the world to be awarded Platinum status, putting it in a category that only a handful of businesses from around the world have managed to achieve.

EarthCheck is an internationally-recognised environmental management and certification programme designed for the travel and tourism industry. Members are able to competitively benchmark the efficiency of their operations against internationally-compliant standards of best practice.

EarthCheck businesses are benchmarked against ever-evolving criteria, with stringent annual audits including a full on-site audit of the complete operation every second year. Creeksyde  has just achieved its tenth EarthCheck certification.

Creeksyde owner Erna Spijkerbosch said she was “absolutely thrilled” with the acknowledgement and recognition of the business’s efforts towards sustainable practice.

“Working with EarthCheck keeps the business on its toes in every aspect of our operation,” she said.

“Benchmarking tests our operations and we’re graded as either ‘benchmark’, ‘best practice’, or ‘better than best practice’.

“In most cases we’re consistently achieving ‘better than best practice’ and are proud of this.”

In keeping with its environmentally conscious stance and its standing as an EarthCheck certified destination, Mrs Spijkerbosch said Creeksyde’s latest project had been to re-work the recycling sorting area at the holiday park to help improve aesthetics and divert even more waste from landfill.

“It’s modelled a little bit on a ‘Steptoe and Son’ yard, similar to the one made famous by the BBC series in the UK many years ago,” said Mrs Spijkerbosch.

“Eighteen months ago we launched our fabulous Oast House which as anyone who’s visited our park will know, is our very ‘unique’ ablutions block featuring artwork by our nephew Marc.

“When it came to remodelling our recycling area, we wanted to make it just as fabulous, so we’ve had our talented nephew do another amazing paint job for us.”

Marc Spijkerbosch is a world-renowned ‘trompe l’oeil’* artist. His latest piece for Creeksyde acts as a ‘curtain’ to the recycling area, screening the back-of-house area from guests while also drawing attention to and promoting recycling efforts.

“We’ve managed to make a recycling area look interesting, using reusable materials and creating an interesting and functional area for staff to work,” said Mrs Spijkerbosch.

“The new screen is decorative and educational, adding to the ‘self-marketing’ concepts in the park, by which I mean that guests take lots of photos, spread the message by word-of-mouth and through social media, and often come back to the park, even when they’re not staying with us, to show their friends.

“It’s rather entertaining as we see more and more guests reaching for their cameras when going to the toilets and depositing their rubbish.”

Creeksyde is a full holiday accommodation park with a wide range of sites and cross section of accommodation. For reservations go to www.camp.co.nz

* Trompe l’oeil is a technique used in realistic paintings to trick the eye, especially through the use of perspective to create an illusion of three-dimensionality

More about Marc Spijkerbosch

Marc Spijkerbosch, (43) picked up a paintbrush at an early age. Inspired by his early years filled with hunting, tramping and fishing the back-country, he has held a number of successful landscape exhibitions. Nineteen years ago he was appointed Supervising Artist on the Aranui Murals Project in Christchurch, which is where the journey into trompe l’oeil began.

In the last 20 years, Marc has painted some 500 trompe l’oeil works for hotels, restaurants, residential, civic and corporate clients.  His work sees him travel extensively around New Zealand, with murals in Australia, India, and the United States.