Time for a reset over tourism

Many parts of the world have had a shock this year as Covid19 turned everything on its head. While New Zealand has been one of the places that’s gone back to a slightly more normal life much quicker than most, that isn’t completely true for all of us.

If your business relied on tourism, you’re probably still feeling the pandemic pressure.

It’s highlighted to me that some parts of New Zealand, and indeed the wider Pacific region, have been putting too much focus on inbound tourism as the one industry to save their economies.

Tourism can be a great injection of cash for a local area. But it also often provides lowpaying jobs to people with fairly limited training and future job prospects. We’ve seen that in the jobs that have disappeared so far this year — they were often hospitality, tourism and retail jobs paying barely more than minimum wage.

Tourists pay big bucks to experience the “local culture” when they arrive in a different country. But if the local culture has become young people going straight from school into poorly paid roles at big tourism operators, what’s really happening?

As we’ve seen this year, when you’re heavily dependent on one part of the economy, it’s easy for things to turn bad very quickly, especially if there’s no plan for the what if? I remember visiting Hawaii some years ago to ask what they would do differently if they could and the conversation was around better product development not tourism to support their people and the environment.

New Zealand needs to inject as much effort into things such as the tech industry as it does into tempting tourists. Now that the world has discovered it’s possible to work remotely, we’re not as far away from the action as a map might suggest. Covid19 has presented an opportunity for a reset. We get to think about how we want to work in the future.