About Us

About NAVIGATE

There is a confidence returning to the global luxury travel market and it is a pleasure to represent a collection of independently owned small luxury hotels and resorts based in New Zealand and the Pacific.

Navigate Oceania Wharekauhau Country Estate

NAVIGATE OCEANIA is a global marketing company with a solid reputation over the past 20 years for delivering luxury travellers to our clients small luxury hotels and resorts. Our blend of marketing, industry experience, relationships with supplier principle influencers and experts in the luxury niche channels ensure we understand the wants and needs of luxury travellers. Results are everything and our style and strategy in marketing is successful.

Navigate is respected for its intimate knowledge of what motivates global luxury suppliers and travellers. And right now there is a shift in what suppliers need and expect from luxury accommodation providers in the world. They want to work with collections like Navigate who are trusted aggregators of premium product in our part of the world. Owners, principle influencers and journalists recognise our global reach, professionalism and effectiveness.

Working with the NAVIGATE Team

Karine Thomas

Director

Karine is highly respected as a top-level strategic business practitioner who has the ability to implement high-level marketing planning and implementation. Karine is the face of Navigate Oceania. A hallmark of Karine’s leadership in the industry is her ability to develop and maintain enduring personal relationships with her clients and the ever changing global supply chain. She is recognised as a specialist in the Northern Hemisphere and Australasian supply chain. She is recognised as one of the most successful marketing, press and public relations specialists in luxury travel and tourism.

After an early career in sales and marketing of luxury hotels in London with the Hyde Park Hotel (now the Mandarin Oriental), she went on to work in senior sales, marketing and publicity roles with such major hotel companies as Forte Hotels, Shangri La, Radisson, Small Luxury Hotels and Starwood based in the UK, Europe, USA and Australia. She returned to New Zealand after 20 years working in luxury hotels in 2000.

A winner of many prestigious tourism and advertising awards worldwide, Karine continues to excel by winning awards annually for her current clients.

Karine’s network of travel and media contacts, and her solid experience in the international luxury tourism market working with consortiums such as Virtuoso, Signature and American Express Fine Hotels and Resorts, ensures Navigate provides a cost-effective source of targeted marketing and press coverage for clients.

A Board member of the New Zealand Tourism Industry Association, and inaugural member of the Luxprience and Pure Luxury Boards, Karine completed her Master of Management (Luxury Branding) at the University of Auckland, holds a Post-Graduate Diploma (Business), University of Auckland and a Graduate Diploma of Advanced Hotel Marketing from Cornell University in NY, USA. In 2010 Karine was a finalist in the Veuve Clicquot (New Zealand) Business Awards.

Glynn Christian

Press Relations

Glynn Christian brings unrivalled international journalistic experience to Navigate in the fields of hospitality, food and wine and travel. He is the editor of our Navigate Confidential magazine, copy writer for our NAVIGATE+ white label website and writes our media releases and copy for print, social and e-media.

He has regularly written for the New Zealand Herald and their Saturday magazine CA NVAS, on food and cookery, hospitality venues, interior designers and as their restaurant critic in addition to UK’s Sunday Telegraph, ELLE UK, Punch, House and Gardens, BBC Good Food and Gardens Illustrated.

He is also an experienced food and wine judge: including most recently as Chief Judge for three years UK judge for the Hong Kong Food Festival.

Tizio Panara

Online Development

Tizio is our online development director for all key marketing initiatives. He is not only an internationally recognized software developer, who designed and implemented our vision for NAVIGATE+, but Tizio started life as a Graphic Designer – so what he excels in not only works well but looks great too! He has worked with some of the New Zealand’s largest consumer brands which brings an understanding of the ever changing digital world to Navigate; the importance of providing interfacing marketing initiatives that assist not only our Navigate members, but shares those platforms with the supplier to sell to the end user, the consumer.

Team Support

Navigate has assembled a solid team who support the key team members. These co-ordinators provide a service second to none. They do this because they believe in what they do. Among the support services provided are assistance with Social Media, Online Travel Agent Management and other specific communications.

The support team are specialists in their area of marketing or communications and this adds real value to the level of communications on behalf of our clients. The Navigate strategy around support staff delivers flexibility so that we can secure the services of skilled professionals who know how to leverage the rapidly changing media landscape.