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Rene de Monchy, Tourism New Zealand chief executive. Photo / Dean Purcell
The tourism rebuild is underway and gathering pace. The industry is enticing the international visitors back with a bit of tease and a dollop of Kiwi’s down-to-earth friendliness.
After a two-year Covid hiatus, the country’s
“The temptation as you restart your marketing around the world is to bombard consumers with all the many things they can do in New Zealand,” says Rene de Monchy, Tourism New Zealand chief executive.
“We’ve taken a bold and creative approach in destination marketing to show up differently than other countries and to cut through the competitive space for international visitors.
“We are very driven by research and insights to understand what our individual visitors want and what we need to do for our destination. We can then make interventions that move the needle,” says de Monchy.
“We are coming off a zero base (of international visitors) and that’s a funny place to be in.”
The If You Seek campaign, being advertised digitally and on television in key visitor markets, teases audiences with snippets on what is on offer and invite them to take the time to seek more from their visit.
The campaign features a series of short, artistic videos showing destinations, Maori culture and activities such as visiting Tane Mahuta in Northland, Hell’s Gate near Rotorua, Great Taste Trail in Nelson and the Hooker Valley near Aoraki Mt Cook.
The videos inevitably finish with a question or unsolved “mystery” with the invitation to come and find the answer. For instance: “Kina. What does this New Zealand delicacy actually taste like? Well, come find one.”
De Monchy says the campaign doesn’t give the game away to consumers. It is sneak-peeks of some well-known destinations and places and experiences that aren’t as recognisable.
“We want to tap into the curiosity of our target high-quality traveller, who we know are adventurous and keen to dig beneath the surface of the places they visit, whether on the beaten path or not.”
De Monchy says there may be some misinterpretation about high-quality and high-value visitors.
“We intentionally talk about high-quality visitors but we are not just going after the wealthy people. It’s a deeper insight than that. Spending by visitors is just one of the metrics. We look at the scope of activities, what time of the year they come, and their environmental consciousness.
“Backpackers are quality visitors. They stay for longer periods, are likely to travel the length and breadth of the country and they go off the beaten path. Indian holidaymakers like to travel in November and April and they bring quality to the sector outside of the peak season. It’s a mix of audience that make up the high-quality tourism sector.”
Franz Mascarenhas, Cordis Auckland managing director, says choosing one visitor over another is not a recipe for success and New Zealand needs all segments of the business.
“We have the facilities, infrastructure and natural beauty to satisfy the requisite demand.
While the benefits of high-value visitors are obvious, tourists such as backpackers are equally important — not to mention they comprise a significant amount of the workforce for the tourism businesses which are facing significant labour shortages,” he says.
De Monchy says there are two buzzwords — meaningful travel and transformative travel — to meet consumer desires as they come out of the Covid pandemic. “They’ve been stuck at home thinking about life. They want to get out of the cities, explore and enjoy the countryside, and make it meaningful.
“They want to engage with our culture and people, and interact with our environment in a respectful way. We are super well-placed for that,” de Monchy says.
Over the past two months Tourism NZ has led three tourism missions to Los Angeles, London and Singapore involving nearly 200 tourism operators, and concentrating on inbound travel agents.
Tourism NZ also formed a joint venture with Air New Zealand which began its direct flight to New York on September 17. They are promoting the If You Seek campaign in New York State, and making a special offer for flights to Auckland in the low and shoulder seasons, with the option to add a visit to any one of Air NZ’s 20 domestic destinations.
The international visitors are returning. Stats NZ reported that for the first month since March 2020 (the start of the Covid pandemic), overseas visitor arrivals exceeded 100,000 — to be exact 134,200, coinciding with the school holidays in New Zealand and Australia.
This is just over half of the 255,600 visitors in July 2019. In April 2020, there were just 1734 international arrivals compared with 528,255 in December 2019. Annual arrivals till then were 3.88m, falling to 52,665 in the year to March last year.
But annual visitor arrivals were back to about 480,000 in August this year, many of them visiting friends and family but holidaymakers picked up — particularly Australians heading for the Queenstown ski fields.
Retail, accommodation and transport surprisingly made up 1.1 per cent of the June quarter gross domestic product which grew 1.7 per cent. The accommodation and food services component was up 30 per cent.
Industry experts including de Monchy accept it would take at least three years to return to the pre-Covid glory days when the tourism sector became the country’s No 1 export earner with earnings of $17.5 billion or $48 million per day – and that’s still less than 1 per cent of the global value.
In March 2021 international tourism expenditure in New Zealand was down 91.5 per cent to $1.5b.
Airlines need to return to full service in and out of New Zealand, the Chinese — one of the country’s key markets — need to resume travelling, and cruise ships, which carried 322,00 passengers and contributed revenue of $570m, need to get back to full steam. This should all start happening next year.
In Queenstown, it’s already happening. Glen Sowry, chief executive of Queenstown Airport, says the ski season has got off to a cracking start.
“The winter season is almost back to what it was like pre-Covid. We quickly saw strong demand out of Australia when the border re-opened for them in May. The recent four-day Snow Machine Music Festival sold 5000 tickets in Australia.
“We are fortunate that Queenstown is seen as a short-haul destination. I was chatting with a skier from Gold Coast who was visiting for 10 days. He had a 20-minute drive to the (Gold Coast) airport and a three-hour flight to world-class facilities.
“It was quicker, better and cheaper for him to come to Queenstown than skiing domestically in Australia.
“This gives us a competitive advantage. But over the summer months it will take a while for the long-haul Northern Hemisphere visitors to return,” Sowry says.
Greg Foran, chief executive of Air NZ, says “after the borders opened, the first wave of travel was families and friends catching up on lost time, but now we’re seeing strength in the leisure market.
“The Tasman routes are very busy and we are seeing plenty of bookings from North America over the summer season. Whether it will be sustained is yet to be seen and along with the impact of higher fares we remain cautious, but remember we still haven’t seen places like Japan and China come back into the mix yet.”
Foran says it’s estimated some 60 million Americans are actively considering a trip to New Zealand and more than five million of them are in close reach of JFK airport in New York.
“That’s a huge market and we intend to drive the east coast of the United States hard. We will continue to promote that New Zealand is open for business. Not everyone thinks we are.”
Grant Webster, chief executive of Tourism Holdings, which runs a fleet of camper vans, says “we are seeing good demand for summer and early next year and people are responding well to price increases.
“The capital costs of the motor homes have gone up, almost double-digit increases, and international visitors missed out on the early bird discounts in the shoulder season because the border wasn’t open,” he says.
“We are optimistic about the tourism recovery but we can’t take it for granted. We are in a competitive environment — the Australian government, for instance, has allocated $60m to restart tourism, Canada and the United States are spending a lot — and our sector needs additional funding.
“We need to open up the immigration settings and get the labour supply and holiday visas sorted. A lot of work needs to take place to get New Zealand in the minds of people overseas.
“We need to compete with other countries by investing more,” says Webster.
It’s not a surprise that tourism-aligned CEOs in the Herald’s 2020 and 2021 Mood of the Boardroom surveys were more pessimistic about the business situation in their industry than they are now.
Pre-Covid, Tourism was New Zealand’s No 1 export earner with annual earnings of $17.5 billion or $48 million per day — that’s still less than 1 per cent of the global value of the sector. But by March 2021, international tourism expenditure in New Zealand was down 91.5 per cent to $1.5b.
Publicly listed, Auckland Airport and Air New Zealand — which saw their earnings plummet as border closures wiped out the international travel that underpins the tourism business — mounted successful capital raisings; Tourism Holdings sold assets.
In the 2022 CEOs Survey, the CEOs of these companies are markedly more upbeat about the sector’s prospects.
But labour and immigration issues remain a handbrake, as Graham Skellern reports.
– Fran O’Sullivan
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