Tourism spend fails outliers
A report on when tourists visit and where they spend money shows four gateway regions are still the big winners.
Titled Regional and Seasonal Dispersal, the report from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment’s report (MBIE) said Waikato and the West Coast had experienced a 16 per cent average growth in international visitor spending year-on-year.
But overall tourist spending was not evenly distributed across the country.
In the year to June, as in the past eight years, 65 per cent of the international tourist spending was concentrated in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Queenstown.
In the South Island, non-gateway regions were gaining or maintaining their share of tourist dollars, but most North Island regions in that category were falling.
The West Coast, Wanaka, Fiordland and the Nelson-tasman region showed large gains in their spend share, while Hawke’s Bay, Taranaki, Manawatu, Northland, Lake Taupo and Whanganui reported a drop.
The report also looked at the travel and spending habits of different nationalities.
Those able to speak some English were more comfortable getting off the beaten track and Germans spent more than half their travel budgets in nongateway regions.
Chinese spent the least in those areas, but their sheer numbers meant they still poured $293 million into smaller centres.
Last year Tourism New Zealand announced it was spending most of its $85m advertising budget on promoting travel during the shoulder and low seasons to take pressure off popular spots such as Queenstown during the summer peak.
MBIE’S deputy chief executive of labour, science and enterprise, Paul Stocks, said the Government’s tourism strategy to attract high-value visitors to a range of regions throughout the year was beginning to work.
More visitors were coming in autumn, which was favoured by Indian visitors, and older travellers were more likely to travel in shoulder seasons.
However, the MBIE report said New Zealand was still a highly seasonal destination with the vast majority of visitors coming in the summer months between December and February.
The latest figures from Statistics New Zealand show visitor arrivals and migration have once again set records.
Our unadjusted annual net gain (more arrivals than departures) of migrants was a record 70,300 in the year to October, 300 ahead of the previous record set in September.
There were 3.42 million visitor arrivals in the October 2016 year, up 12 per cent from the same period in 2015.