The new realities of NZ tourism post pandemic

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Tourism is one of our major industries, but the plague must be kept out of NZ and that means the borders MUST remain tightly controlled.

NZs despicable hyper tourism that has seen freedom campers shitting all over our country, that sees our infrastructure groan under the weight of so many tourists and the low value it provides must all be challenged.

Rethink Tourism:

Domestic Tourism

Watching exclusive overpriced NZ Tourism having to beg actual kiwis to visit them at massively discounted prices is wondrous isn’t it? Some of our most spectacular places now affordable for the foreseeable future AND our roads free from hyper tourism too?

Thanks Covid19!

We should look at an extra couple of holidays each year to elongate our long weekends, but the tourism business must change their price gouging to entice Kiwi’s along for the long weekend experience and we should culturally look to celebrate the Kiwi Long Weekend.

Boutique Tourism

One of the good things about the tourism reset is that we must move from hyper tourism to boutique tourism.

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With our borders set to remain closed until a vaccine is available, hyper tourism is dead and we should all cheer that death.

The spin that the tourism dollar trickles down to the rest of us seems like a pretty cheap price to pay if it means we all get to have our roads and traffic flow back.

We must also add to the tourism industry the obscene amount of pollution air travel generates. In a rapidly warming planet, these green house gas emissions can not be tolerated, so hyper tourism must die for the planet to survive.

That doesn’t mean we should simply dump tourism as an industry altogether, that would be economic suicide, but we must for once price the bloody experience properly.

If you want to visit a plague free vacation destination then you pay for it.

No more discount flights with the dregs of the holidaying experience landing on our shores to freedom camp crap all over our nation.

If you want to visit plague free NZ, you have to pay for the 14 day mandatory quarantine stay and accept ongoing track trace measures while in New Zealand.

We should be resetting the International Tourism experience infrastructure now so that we have the hotels to house tourists quarantining here for their mandatory 14 days before moving through to their holiday.

We need to move away from hyper tourism to boutique tourism and appropriately price that experience.

What is the price for a plague free holiday? Ask anyone in Paris, New York or London.

 

There are enormous structural changes coming our way in a post pandemic world and we need to see ourselves as one of the life boats on a climate crisis planet. Tourism is an area we need to urgently reform so that when external shocks occur, we are flexible enough to sustain them.

A Minister of Tourism that can articulate this new vision forward is currently missing in action.

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21 COMMENTS

  1. Can agree with almost all that but i’d better point out you don’t get traffic flow back until you get the long haul trucks off our roads.
    Send that shit by rail or boat.

    • +100 Keepcalmcarryon…and we want ecologically aware tourists who leave no footprints or rubbish and treat New Zealand with reverence

      ….this means severely curtailing cheap tourism where the money flows out of the country into one countries coffers

      …this means getting rid of their foreign tour guides

      … and bus drivers

      …and shop owners

      …and putting the money back in the hands of New Zealanders eg indigenous New Zealanders…Maori and Pakehas

      ….this country is OURS and not up for SALE !

      • BTW I took a friend from overseas to the Canterbury Museum and was introduced to the Southland reconstructed Kiwiana Paua House by a delightful polite young Chinese woman…she introduced me to my own culture as if I was an ignorant stranger there!

        I thought there is something wrong here and …FUCK CANTERBURY MUSEUM…they are bending over too far! ( I felt like a stranger in a strange land…definitely a strange museum)

        …where are the Ngai Tahu guides and the young Cantabrians introducing people to their own museum and culture and history?!

        btw the reconstructions of Maori in that museum reduce them to absurdity…no longer are they depicted as the people of noble stature they once were who signed the Treaty…they look like little Gollums…That Canterbury Museum has definitely gone down hill and in a racist way imo

        I didnt say it of course …bút smiled sweetly to the young Asian who lectured me on my own country

        ( I guess this is what they do in Tibet now)

  2. Thank you Martyn from stating the truth about our badly planed tourism industry recklessly controlled by greedy operators today.
    Quote;
    “NZs despicable hyper tourism that has seen freedom campers shitting all over our country, that sees our infrastructure groan under the weight of so many tourists and the low value it provides must all be challenged”.

    Yes the whole industry is like the wild west and needs to be questioned now is the time, as we used to travel during the 1970-and 1980s when it was a kiwi thing and prices were very reasonable then but today the prices are astronomical and out of reach from Kiwis today.

  3. “We need to move away from hyper tourism to boutique tourism and appropriately price that experience.”
    Thank you for these words of wisdom.

  4. No chance of a change in policy with this Minister who is still singing the praises of freedom camping for tourists.
    All tourists should be required to have medical insurance and not allowed to hirer a vehicle within 24 hrs of arrival. Other countries have done this and the saving on ACC payments alone would be huge

    • Trev – At this moment in time I don’t care two hoots about ACC savings, but if you are right, and Davis does not accept that tourism prostitution of NZ needs to be majorly curtailed, then Labour must not be allowed to be government again.

      • Monsieur Sennitt is correct in that this government has expressed its view that freedom camping be still allowed as freedom campers spend so much -on petrol and 2 minute noodles.

  5. “We need to move away from hyper tourism to boutique tourism and appropriately price that experience.”

    Fine, as long as that doesn’t also mean it’s “appropriately priced” for domestic NZ tourists, which I suspect it will be. So slow clap for advocating making domestic tourism for NZers even more expensive than it was before Wuhan Flu, I guess?

  6. Yep please let’s set our goal as high end tourism, similar to our wine exports. 14 day Quarantine and a grand or two to maintain our infrastructure min one month say.

    • Really? That would completely kill off tourism for good. Get real. New Zealand isn’t a major tourist destination by default – you have to entice people here. Why would anyone in Europe come all the way here and sit isolated in a hotel room for 14 days when you can just drive from UK to France or Germany or Spain, Romania etc. it’s already going to be a long time before international flights are scheduled for NZ. Until we create a demand for air travel – no airline will fly here – it’s just not economic.

  7. Fuck tourists.
    Focus on agriculture. Like, ya know…growing foods an’ wool fibre and one day, one day To To perhaps even maybe cannabis an’ that?
    The last time I traveled through Sou East Asia I realised what I was…
    I was a tourist. I toured impoverished countries because my shitty little Kiwi dollar went further thus to enable me to see and feel what poverty could afford me for my shits and giggles.
    I think of that now, and I feel deeply ashamed of myself. In my desperate defence tho, I was ignorant. Nothing wrong with ignorance. It’s that uncomfortable state just before enlightenment and enlightenment is simply the gift of shame that just keeps on giving.
    I nearly went to the Killing Fields but thank Christ, something told me to instead go to the rubbish dump where villages and been established by people who scratched through the vile effluent of others for the price of a vital daily bowl of rice.
    When tourists slouch about like Zombies here? We’re simply zoo animals to them, so fuck tourism.

    I bought a sliver of Blue Cod and three dwarf oysters the other evening.
    That cost me $657,989.45.
    I bought two pair of 70% wool socks (30% nylon for ‘strength’.That’s a fucking load of shit people.) to go with my nice, wooly Allbird sneakers.
    Socks? Made in China, so exotic $550,000.00
    Sneakers? Made in South Korea. Equally exotic $89,425,689.00
    What AO/NZ farmers of cross bred wool get per kg?
    $2.00.
    ( The sheep? Forced to breed until her teeth fall out then she’d be off to the freezer to be turned into sausages for us to eat at the barbi while we wear her wool. Irony, right? Then, her flesh would go on a journey through our digestive tract, out our arseholes and into the ocean.That, right there, is a sheep horror story.)
    My new sneakers and socks combined had about .35 cents worth of wool in them.
    The rest of the money now belongs to people who didn’t earn it.
    That, right there, is AO/NZ.
    AO/NZ’s fucked.
    @ MB? You really have no idea do you?
    There was a pandemic designed generations prior to this latest silly little hand made virus.
    I call it an epidemic of manufactured ignorance.
    Our Good Ol’ Boys built a cloak of bull shit then covered AO/NZ under it.
    We really have no actual idea of what the fuck’s going on here. We’ve been lied to so often for so long that not many people really know what it is that’s actually what it is…!
    We’re living in loopy La La Land.
    You’re all like intellectually shambling sleepy sheeple people. It’s quite bizarre, to think there are so few actual, bona fide on-to-it types who know what’s what. It’d be like wandering about within an LSD laced and endlessly looping Black Mirror episode if it were not for the fact that it is that, which it is.
    I have to go into the forest with my dog to talk to the trees because they’re the only ones who make any fucking sense.

  8. I agree on the need to for more sustainable level of tourism.

    I agree that the tourist industry price gouging that prevents a large number of New Zealanders from experiencing their own country needs to be reined in.

    I agree that mass cheap air travel is a major factor in damaging the global climate and needs to be cut back,

    But the idea that tourism should be a boutique industry affordable only to the global wealthy, somewhat grates with our egalitarian spirit.

    I still think there should be room for the backpackers and freedom campers.

    When I was young my father used to take us freedom camping, with just a tent and car. He would pitch the tent for the night on any free public land. We never stayed in hotel or motel, or even at a camping ground. We couldn’t afford it.

    One memorable family holiday we got stranded in Wellington with no money for petrol for the return drive to Auckland, and I remember my father having to pawn our belongings for the gas money.

    Accusing freedom campers of ‘Shitting all over our country’ is emotive hyperbole.
    Many times I think this problem is overstated by the tourist industry who hate the idea of poorer people holidaying on the cheap and want to strongarm everyone into their hotels and motels and camping grounds, not out of any genuine concern for the environment but purely out of monetary interest.

    If facilities to go to the toilet are not available, that is not the freedom campers fault, but the fault of the local authorities and community boards, many of which I can’t help feel are influenced by the local hoteliers and holiday accommodation providers who don’t have an interest in providing public facilities for freedom campers.

    • Thanks Patrick.
      Re. freedom camping and backpacker tourism; people also forget that this market is made up of predominantly younger people, the goodwill generated by their visit here is hard to quantify but I’m sure it has economic benefits over the longer term, even if only resulting in a return visit with a larger spend when they become middle or older aged.

      • Yes and its the younger people who support our smaller towns and seasonal work positions – you don’t see the rich people flying in to go to the back blocks.. They go to the likes of Queenstown and Rotorua and like to be waited on – NOT wait on tables.

  9. That’s fine remain on your isolated island at the end of the earth feeling smug. No one wants you anywhere else either

  10. There are definitely issues that need to be looked at and solutions provided. However calls for bans on Freedom camping are ill considered, as the majority of Freedom campers have no choice – think Hunters, Cycle touring, Water users (camp on shore by night)- yup all defined as Freedom campers under section 5 of the Act! It is not all about those in RV’s and it never has been. Responsible Campers Association Inc are proud to have been at the forefront of several major policy changes recently – one being the lack of education which we exposed in our March 2018 Camping report, and the 2nd being the provision of public toilets by NZTA in non-urban areas for the benefit of all travelers. Meantime our accreditation program provides education and once evidence of knowledge is proven a person can become an accredited responsible camper. It is after all the people that decide to be responsible – not the mode of camping. The focuis for nearly 30 years has been on the facilities in a vehicle – while failing to acknowledge that only the minority of campers even camp in vehicles!! Time that changed . http://www.accreditedcampernz.com

  11. Country Boy your on a roll, LSD tripping tours while walking in amounts the trees….sounds like a form or euphoric utopia; those of us old enough will recall NZ families getting out amongst the hills and along the lovingly cared for tracks and DOC huts, weekends of simple back to basic get away weekends were cheap to enjoy…..dressed in grandmas knitted jersey, cooking on outdoor fires and waking to frozen norsewear socks drying out on the line. Life was simple and cheap………..now everyone has debt thru the bejesus and a fancy boat and double cab Ute to tow it to the five star Bach.
    How can one expect the old tourist operator to drop their prices to provide the cheap kiwi get away weekend when everything else is stupidly expensive.
    The CEO of Whakapapa ski field earns 440k per year and the place is going to the dogs where they stick it to the hard core skiier and force them to pay north of $140 for a one day pass and can’t even have the High West Tee running……..the likes of Ngai Tahu have bought up a heap of the boutique Franz Josef glacial, Dart River Jet Boat tour operators and like other corporate and government entities are so top heavy in their wage expectations would rather shut down for a year due to Covid than keep running to provide a domestic service….and sod the low wage tourism guide.
    Back in the 80’s we used to take truck loads of kiwis down rivers on inflatable rafts, social club piss up adventure getaways were a real thing; but back then the compliance costs were low for operators and rent was cheap for staff.
    If you all want a high end tourist with out the freedom campers shitting all over the parking sites then we need to be able to roll back time to where NZ was truly clean and green…..but that would require the end of corporate type diary farms belching out green gunk stuffing up our water ways………..there seems to be a theme here.
    IMHO I think tourism is dead for a year at least, what an incredible time for kiwis to get out amongst the great walks of the South Island. The land must be sighing in relief at least.

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