How big is tourism?
We aren’t getting international tourism at the moment, which is obviously a problem for those working in the international tourism industry1, and to some extent a problem for everyone because of the hit to the economy.
I saw some speculation on Twitter today about how big international tourism actually is, and about the extent to which NZ tourism expenditure staying in NZ would offset the losses. Now, there will obviously be gaps, where foreign and domestic tourists don’t do the same things (eg, domestic tourists don’t buy long-distance plane tickets from Air New Zealand), but what about the totals?
Overall, tourism (as defined in the tourism satellite account) brought in $17 billion in the year ending June 2019. Nearly $4 billion of it was actually international education lasting less than a year, leaving a bit over $13 billion in ‘real’ tourism. That’s just behind dairy, but roughly equal to meat and wood products together. The short-term international-education component of ‘tourism’ was a bit a head of fruit exports.
Domestic expenditures on international tourism aren’t completely captured, but the Household Expenditure Survey estimates that all NZ households together spent $2 billion on “overseas accomodation prepaid in NZ” and $4.5 billion on “international air transport” in the year to June 2019. That’s going to miss food bought overseas and admission tickets to cultural experiences, and some overseas accomodation, but it still looks as though redirecting NZ tourism locally would leave a big hole. The Household Expenditure Survey does miss out on business travel that isn’t a household expenditure, but it seems more of a stretch that business travel spending will just be redirected to NZ.
1 I was surprised to find this, in one sense at least, includes me, since international students here for less than 12 months are counted in the ‘tourism satellite account’.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
Seems to me from the numbers that ‘tourism related’ seems to count a lot of domestic demand
From one of the tables: 2018 numbers
‘Food and Beverage serving’ services gives
Commercial $300m
Government $100m
Household $1600m
International $2500m
So is international more than all the others put together ?
Or others like clothing and footwear, domestic $1250 m , international $650 mill
The proportions seem way out of wack. Are Farmers, Warehouse and Kmart getting 1/3 of their revenue from tourists?
Air passenger transport at $5.3 bill, is that all under the tourism category, and how much is international tourists
I think all air travel is counted as ‘ tourism characteristic’
Even the origin of tourists, with Australia way out ahead of all the others. From my own experience a large share of that is NZers living in Australia who come back for ‘friends and family’ related reasons before flying out again, not a campervan tour of the South island.
4 years ago