The New Zealand-Aotearoa Government Tourism Strategy, published in 2019, sets out a stewardship role for the government to ensure tourism enriches New Zealand through more productive, sustainable and inclusive growth, building better partnerships with Māori tourism enterprise, iwi, hapū and tangata whenua.
New Zealand’s Tourism Strategy focuses on five key areas: the Economy, International and domestic Visitors, the Environment, New Zealanders and its communities, and regions. In addition to growing the value of international tourism while managing social license and within environmental constraints, and co-ordination across the tourism system to improve tourism outcomes, current policy priorities include:
Long-term Sustainable Funding Mechanisms, including implementing the International Visitor Conservation and Tourism Levy and accompanied strategic investment plan. A revised investment plan was produced in 2023 to focus government tourism spending on nationally significant investments and projects that provide a co-ordinated approach to address shared tourism system changes, including consultation with the private sector.
Setting local agendas for destination management through collaborative Destination Management Plans in each region to uphold a positive social licence. Funding from the COVID-19 recovery funding has enabled all 31 Regional Tourism Organisations to complete a tailored Destination Management Plan. The plans are agreed by tourism businesses, locals, including local Māori communities, local government, and other stakeholders. Initial plans were funded by central government, and implementation will be undertaken locally, including resourcing.
Better data and insight, including implementing the Tourism Data Domain Plan, identifying future trends that could impact on the tourism system and co-ordinate and share data and insight to support the industry.
This builds on recent work undertaken as part of the Tourism Industry Transformation Plan, a partnership between the Government and the tourism industry, workers and Māori that aims to build a regenerative tourism system that gives back more to people, communities and the environment than it takes. The Better Work phase focused on addressing key system issues facing the tourism workforce, including addressing pay and conditions, demand fluctuations, firm maturity and scale, and skill gaps. This resulted in the publication of the Better Work Action Plan in March 2023. This work was accompanied by the Tourism and hospitality Workforce Survey undertaken in 2022 to better understand the issues for the tourism workforce. The second phase of the Tourism Transformation Plan focussed on the environment with a draft action plan published in June 2023. To measure and monitor the sustainability of the tourism ecosystem, New Zealand have introduced the Sustainable Tourism Explorer. Data is collected, or is planned to be collected, on a range of topics such as waste management, quality of visitor experience, tourism demand, amenities and facilities, and regions’ reliance on tourism. However, a key issue with tourism data relating to sustainability is that many measures have not, or cannot, be quantified.
A Tourism Data Leadership Group was formed, including representatives from industry and academia, to create a collaborative forum to identify the information needs of the diverse set of tourism data users (industry, central and local government, communities, iwi, interest groups, academics and commentators), communicate those needs to the wide range of stakeholders, and support the implementation of possible solutions, including the provision of data and insights to users.
New Zealand has also taken action to regulate impacts of freedom camping (see box below).
