The news of a shift to Orange tonight is great news for Auckland’s city centre – signalling the welcome return of major indoor events, dancing and importantly more workers back to the city centre. To celebrate, Heart of the City will be hitting the streets to reconnect city centre workers with their favourite “work locals” by handing out hundreds of vouchers for free coffees and lunches on the first few days after Easter.

Heart of the City Chief Executive Viv Beck says that “The move to Orange this time around, along with the borders reopening, is significant. This is a major relief after two years at the epicentre of the pandemic. Things have started to look up over the last few weeks, with an increase in foot traffic and spending – but with the numbers still down significantly on last year, Orange will bring an injection of people back into the city centre.”

There are a number of initiatives planned over the coming months to encourage people back into the city centre. Creative and vibrant city environments with lots on are reasons for people to want to be back in their office workplaces – as are the obvious benefits coming from the water cooler conversations, learning from colleagues, and the long overdue team lunches.

“It has been great to see more people around recently and to get positive news from some major firms that they are bringing their teams back to the city centre and creating some excitement around this. Having more of our strong 130,000+ workforce back here brings obvious benefits to our customer facing businesses, as well as the buzz from having more people here, we’ve really missed them.”

Beck says that “We want to remind people of those great places for a morning coffee. Handing out vouchers is a small gesture but it signifies something much more important - small purchases such as a coffee can all add up to make a difference for businesses that have had an extraordinarily hard time over the last few years. We also hope it reminds people of the great places they’ve been missing.”

Half price public transport is also perfectly timed for workers to be returning to the city centre.

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