Road to recovery with different tourism
Reports of Kaikoura’s community and tourism sector as ‘‘Quakes may be mortal blow’’ and ‘‘Can Kaikoura Survive?’’ are alarmist and unhelpful.
The first phase of the community’s response to their devastating earthquakes is drawing to a close. From all accounts these have shown the remarkable support within and beyond the Kaikoura and district community as visitors and those with immediate needs have been moved out of the area.
Recovery is the next task. And there is no doubt that this will be long and difficult. In the past three decades, tourism has emerged as the town’s lifeblood – with over 30 per cent of people reported as visitors at the time of the event. The recommencement of tourist flows and their attendant expenditure is a necessary step to economic recovery, employment and, with them, further steps in community wellbeing.
The first stage in recovery will be the opening of the lifeline road across Highway 70 from Waiau (at one time called the whale’s back road) to its junction with State Highway 7 just north of Culverden. There are already indications that this road could be open, presumably for essential traffic in the first instance, any day now.
Continuous improvement and managed well this road will subsequently be available to tourists. Drawing on previous work undertaken on mapping and modelling tourist flows and activities, it is possible to map and model various stages in this recovery. This would allow for coordinated communications with visitors and rescheduling of tourist and support activities both in the town and along the access route.
By way of comparison, Milford Sound provides a useful starting point. The road from Te Anau is 120km, traversing some very difficult country. The SH70 route (inland road), while windy, is approximately 100km. Day trips, and overnight for some as accommodation becomes confirmed as available, is a distinct possibility. Correspondingly, a day trip from Queenstown to Milford is a whopping 580km – 140km short of a similar one-way trip from Christchurch to Kaikoura. For the more adventurous, a Molesworth circuit could also be examined.
Looking further into the future, the northern section of SH1 will reopen, while the fate of the southern section appears to take longer to resolve.
Milford and Kaikoura both stand as tourist destinations because of their outstanding natural attributes. While in the first scenario mentioned, visitation might be concentrated across the middle of the day, knowledge of estimated travel times, and volumes would allow activities to be rescheduled and offer the community a significant ray of hope.
We have learnt from the Christchurch earthquakes that a different form of tourism emerges. Our experiences are that travellers are overwhelmingly compassionate, genuinely interested in the human and physical stories – and, importantly, willing to spend a little time and money to support a recovering community.
In the bigger picture, this earthquake reminds us again to pay greater attention to the tourism sector. As New Zealand’s largest single export earner (20.7 per cent foreign exchange) and contributing 5.6 per cent directly to GDP, it remains remarkably understudied and some might argue it management underresourced.
Some context of the size of the sector’s growth is warranted here. International tourists to New Zealand double every 12 to 14 years – and have done so since the arrival of jet-powered aircraft in 1959.
Sufficient attention to the continued growth in tourism in New Zealand has not been forthcoming. This year, managing freedom camping, public infrastructure and the conservation estate have been in the news almost weekly.
It is useful to step back and put this growth in context. Twenty years ago there were about 1.4 million international visitors, this year there are 3.4 million. That is an increase of 234 per cent. When we record those visitors as person days (that is taking into account their various lengths of stay), this represents the establishment of a new city of approximately the size of Palmerston North (72,000). Except these folk are on the move each day.
New Zealanders travelling in their own country, recorded an additional 7.4 per cent growth this year to generate $20.4 billion in expenditure. These too could be a key pathway to recovery for Kaikoura. Many would be surprised to learn that international visitors are only about 40 per cent of tourist activity within New Zealand. In fact, only 3 of the 16 regions in New Zealand are more dependent on international rather than domestic travellers for their income.
There will be time to reflect on the integration of tourism destination plans with Civil Defence and emergency management plans and procedures, and again lessons to be learnt. For the present we need to be grateful that the earthquake happened at just after midnight, when most visitors were at their overnight accommodation.
Twelve hours earlier or later it would have produced a vastly different outcome, as indeed would have the changeable weather which is part of our landscape. We have only minimal knowledge, and much of it now well dated on tourists daily travel and activity patterns. Much of this was generated some 15 years ago – when tourist volumes were half of what they are today. And markets and patterns do change.
While we can retrofit these data to local travel routes, build new itineraries for communications and model arrival times to support community recovery, much of this is really a belts-and-braces approach to one of our major industries. Tourism in Kaikoura is neither dead nor awaiting a miracle. What is required is a pragmatic and collaborative approach that rapidly recalibrates tourism demand with communitysupported tourism opportunities and experiences.
* David Simmons is professor of tourism at Lincoln University and has been a researcher and author on tourism in Kaikoura since the mid 1990s.