Taming the crowds
Rethinking the tourism future of Milford Sound Around the world, visitor hotspots are using Covid’s enforced breathing space to rethink how they do tourism. With a Milford Sound master plan due this month, Nikki Macdonald looks at the future of one of Ne
Even the kea have scarpered. There’s not so much as a skraark at Monkey Creek on the Milford Rd, no cheeky beaks at car windows at the Homer Tunnel. The Milford Sound tourists have gone, and with them their food and fun, so why bother.
At the foreshore, beneath the dark pyramid of Mitre Peak, a handful of shuttles occupy the 28 bus bays. As kayak operator of 29 years Rosco Gaudin puts it, this is a tourism time warp. Middle-of-the-day Milford Sound/Piopiotahi, as it hasn’t been seen since the 1970s.
Less than 18 months ago, the cruise terminal was a crush of humanity all looking for that pristine postcard view – the world’s tallest sea cliff rising out of the fiord, without another soul in sight.
The reality was somewhat different. ‘‘It’s extremely overcrowded,’’ wrote Carsten F from Munich, in January 2020. ‘‘We visited 5 years ago and it was crowded, yes, but this time it was just insane. Buses over buses and lots and lots of people . . . We won’t go there again if the situation stays that way.’’
Ray B from Melbourne called it ‘‘oversubscribed’’, with the incessant buzz of planes and helicopters and a boat terminal ‘‘like catching a ferry in Sydney Harbour’’. ‘‘I think there is a danger of this wonderful, quite small, pristine location being spoilt.’’
The numbers were staggering. Cruise liner visits almost quadrupled in 13 years, from 34 in 2006-07 to 133 in 2019-20. Visitor numbers soared from 470,000 in 2004-05, to 946,000 in 2018.
Despite the 2007 Fiordland National Park management plan setting a daily limit of 4000 tourists, that was never enforced. From December 2018 to March 2019, that number was exceeded on 30 days. On February 22, 2018, the tourist counter ticked over to 5771.
‘‘Milford is one of the hotspots in New Zealand and, pre-Covid, it was just a dog’s breakfast,’’ Gaudin says. ‘‘There was nothing nice about it.’’
Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment Simon Upton concluded there was only one thing for it – restricting numbers. But the $3 million collaborative Milford Opportunities Project (MOP) has spent four years looking at the options, and is due to submit a draft master plan at the end of this month.
MOP chairman Keith Turner is promising radical change that could be a blueprint for a tourism reset throughout New Zealand’s pre-Covid hotspots overrun with gawping masses.
What’s the problem? glacier-carved cliffs striped with white ribbons of water were a hit with tourist ships from the early 1880s. The 1888 development of the Milford Track cemented its reputation.
In 1953, the Homer Tunnel opened up land access, but sightseer growth was incremental rather than exponential.
Conservationist Ken Bradley worked in Fiordland National Park for 50 years, including managing Milford Track and Milford Road campsites. He moved to Te Anau as a teenager in 1967 and his parents ran a caravan park. The tourist season was three weeks over Christmas, the school holidays and Easter, with a few grey nomads in between.
Bus tours from Australia and America stayed two nights in Te Anau, because the Milford road was so rough it took all day to drive the 120km to get there. ‘‘Maybe 10 or 15 buses, in the heights of summer, would go into Milford in a day. And maybe 200-300 cars. That would be a really busy day in Milford.’’
Everything changed from the 60s to the 80s, after the rugged highway was sealed and a tourist marketer had a bright idea: Why not spend three nights in Queenstown and travel to Milford Sound from there? That way you can unpack your suitcase, or so the promo pitch went, Bradley recalls.
New Zealand was becoming a hot destination, and Queenstown Airport began to bustle. More flights, more buses, more boats, bigger boats, more cruise ships, bigger cruise ships.
And suddenly, as at Fox Glacier and Franz Josef and Mt Cook, the tap was gushing and there was no pressure release valve. Annual visitor numbers hit almost 1m for the first time in 2018 and that was predicted to double by 2035. Car chaos got so bad the local infrastructure company considered building a multi-storey carpark.
A 2019 Cabinet paper talked of overcrowding, a degrading of the visitor experience, and risk to conservation. ‘‘We expect that current management and infrastructure will not be able to protect conservation and deliver a safe and quality visitor experience,’’ the paper said.
‘‘In my own view, it was unsustainable,’’ Bradley says. ‘‘It just keeps growing and growing and growing and nobody actually sits back and says, where is this actually going to go?’’
Setting a limit limited to 4000 a day, as the 2007 national park plan prescribed.
Bradley agrees: ‘‘I’ve advocated for years there’s got to be a restriction on the number of people going to Milford. It can be done. It’s just got to have somebody with big balls to make the decision.’’
He figures there’s only one way in and out – the Homer Tunnel – so controlling car access would be easy. You could have a summer booking system, as many national parks overseas do, with access or car parking vouchers. Yes, it might restrict spontaneity, but too bad.
‘‘It’s just a change in circumstances – get over it. If we want tourism to be sustainable and enjoy these places, that’s the cost.’’
As the law stands, the Department of Conservation can’t charge an entry fee for national parks. But it has come up with creative alternatives. At
Ka¯ piti Island, visitors need permits, which are limited.
At the Tongariro Crossing, DOC reduced congestion by introducing parking restrictions which forced walkers on to shuttle buses.
Upton’s recent sustainable tourism report said DOC needed more tools to ration access to bulging tourism hotspots. Its new visitor strategy promises to ‘‘reimagine a better future for New Zealand tourism’’, including exploring new ways to manage iconic sites under high pressure, including through pricing, reporting, rationing and scheduling.
But this is far from the first time anyone has suggested limiting numbers at Milford Sound/Piopiotahi.
In 1999, when there were only 312,000 annual visitors, Gaudin was part of a group that produced a Milford Concept Plan.
They found disjointed management, unplanned development and growing dissatisfaction with overcrowding. While they recommended building a mid-range hotel and backpackers, they reiterated the limit of 4000 tourists a day, which the 1991 Fiordland National Park Management Plan had considered the threshold for environmental sustainability.
If the industry couldn’t keep within that, the limit should be enforced
through cruise passenger restrictions or road tolls or limits, the concept plan concluded.
The 2007 Fiordland National Park Management Plan again called for a limit of 4000 daily visitors, plus the removal of all non-bus foreshore car parking within five years to restore the Sound’s ‘‘seriously compromised’’ natural character, and a study into the cumulative effect of boating on the Sound.
But nothing changed. Cars still park on the foreshore, they just pay $20 for the privilege. There was no boating-impacts study and no visitor limit was enforced.
And when DOC tried to cap plane landings, then Conservation Minister Kate Wilkinson overrode its decision. Operators did introduce bigger planes, to reduce the number of flights.
Gaudin says the 1999 plan was a talkfest that was simply ignored. When the Milford Opportunities Project team asked for a copy no-one could find one. ‘‘Which is crazy. How can they know where they are going, if they don’t know where they have been?’’
Other options
Not everyone agrees the Sound was overcrowded, even at its 2018-19 peak. The problem, say some operators, was not bare numbers, but their concentration.
Because most international tourists came on package bus tours from Queenstown, they disgorged at the boat terminal in mass mobs between 11am and 1pm.
They jumped on a cruise boat with up to 200 others, checked out the dramatic hanging glacier-carved valleys, craned their necks to feel the spray at Fairy Falls, gawked at the seals and dolphins and then were back on the bus for the five-hour ride back to Queenstown.
Totally Tourism boss Mark Quickfall, who runs Milford Sound Scenic Flights and Mitre Peak Cruises, argues crowding is subjective and international visitors are used to busier numbers. The 4000 limit is out of date, he says, but does not point to any research suggesting the environmental carrying capacity of the area has changed.
Capping numbers is too blunt, Quickfall says. Instead, operators have been trying to spread the load, with cheaper boat tours at quieter times of the day. But how people travel is also influenced by how overseas companies package tours.
‘‘It’s a bit like saying we want everybody to come in the off-season. If the market says, no, we want to go when it’s summer time, it’s very hard to switch them.’’
Haylee Preston runs Milford Sound Tourism, which is owned by two tour operators and Southland District Council, and which charges boat passengers a $6 fee to fund the harbour infrastructure and DOC work.
Preston says while the passenger terminal was busy at midday, the numbers were well within the boats’ 10,000 daily capacity. There is a moratorium on new boats.
Even Aaron Fleming, DOC director of operations for the southern South Island, won’t say Piopiotahi was overcrowded. At times, there were too many cars, he says.
He acknowledges, however, that all those boats are a risk to wildlife. In Doubtful Sound, increased boat traffic was found to be endangering the fiord’s rare dolphin population.
‘‘In terms of the cumulative effect, if you add that up over a day or a week or even longer, it can start to have an impact on foraging and breeding behaviour.’’
DOC has tightened the boats’ marine mammal viewing conditions to help protect the Sound’s marine life, Fleming says.
Cruise Milford managing director Peter Egerton says numbers could not have kept increasing at the rate they were, and it was time to start seriously considering management. But he also opposes a hard limit of 4000.
‘‘You can’t just shut the gate and say ‘Look, there’s a beautiful place over the hill, but you can’t visit it’.’’
Like many, he believes tourists need to be encouraged to stay in Te Anau rather than Queenstown, so they can be spread throughout the day.
‘‘We’ve got to change the style of tourism we do. People have to be encouraged to stay longer and travel less.’’
There has long been talk of some kind of park and ride, either from Te Anau or somewhere along the Milford Rd, to reduce congestion on the road and at the Sound itself.
One option suggested in a 2020 Milford Opportunities Project survey was hop-on, hop-off, low-carbon buses from Te Anau, with pre-permitted selfdrive parking at Piopiotahi at up to 60 per cent less than current levels.
Te Anau is hurting without international tourists. But even local board chairperson Sarah Greaney, who owns a lodge and whose husband runs a popular souvenir stop, doesn’t want to see a return to pre-Covid numbers at Piopiotahi.
‘‘I do think it had got to the point where the experience had been spoilt.’’
She favours a booking system that spreads the visitor load, as at overseas attractions such as the Leaning Tower of Pisa. And with a less crowded experience, you could charge more for it.
‘‘Nobody wins a price war, where everybody is undercutting each other. It only detracts from the experience, and from the operator’s bottom line, and doesn’t leave people with the best lasting impression.’’
Egerton also believes Piopiotahi tours are too cheap. With heavy discounting, you could pick up a twohour cruise on New Zealand’s supposed premier World Heritage destination for around $50. For context, a two-hour Akaroa dolphin cruise costs $92 per adult.
‘‘Milford should be sold at a value that reflects what’s being delivered,’’ Egerton says. ‘‘In other words, it’s an iconic destination in New Zealand, in one of the top national parks in the world. It’s been grossly undersold for a long period of time.’’
The Master Plan
Keith Turner is holding his tongue. The former Meridian boss chairs the collaborative Milford Opportunities Project group, set up in 2017.
The panel represents the myriad agencies with a stake in Piopiotahi, further complicating its management. It features Nga¯ i Tahu, DOC, district councils, the Transport Agency, MBIE and a tourism operator.
The project is due to deliver a draft master plan for the area at the end of this month. That will go to the Government, before being made public in mid-2021.
Turner won’t reveal the details, but he is clear that there’s a problem that needs fixing. ‘‘The place is very crushed. It’s not the tranquil, pristine, picture that we sell to our foreign tourists. If you look on the internet, you’ll see pictures of Mitre Peak, with pristine sound, glassy calm, not a soul in sight. At peak times, there were more than 5000 people in that very constrained small area.
‘‘The very values that are represented by Milford – pristine wilderness – weren’t what people were experiencing.’’
Turner says the group has looked at everything from access, improvements on both the road and at the Sound, ways to manage public
pressures, ways to protect the area’s conservation values and ways of representing iwi history.
They’ve investigated international case studies, including Canadian national parks and the transformation of Uluru into a cultural experience.
Consultation documents give a clue to the group’s thinking. The project canvassed opinions on cruise ships (almost half favoured reducing their impact); foreshore parking (almost 80 per cent wanted fewer or no cars); a park and ride system (75 per cent were in favour); accommodation on both the Milford Rd and at the Sound; and higher tourist charges to pay for infrastructure (89 per cent in favour).
One major change suggested, which met strong opposition, was removing all fixed wing planes.
Turner is promising ‘‘quite radical system change’’.
‘‘The collection of things I think will be very far-reaching. It will stand Piopiotahi in great stead for 50 years forward and I think will be the starting point for change through pressure points in the conservation estate.’’
While he acknowledges that previous attempts to improve the Piopiotahi experience have gone nowhere, he’s confident the MOP master plan won’t fall on deaf ears.
Gaudin says there will never be another chance like this to change direction.
‘‘If you don’t push the reset button now, before you know it, in probably less than a decade, we’re going to be back to square one . . . I’d like to go back there as an old man, in my 80s, and go ‘Gee, they did well. Milford is a pristine, beautiful spot’.’’