New Zealand Tourism Targets U.S. and Canadian Tourists

15.06.2024 - 10:51 / skift.com / Delta Airlines / United Airlines / Dawit Habtemariam

New Zealand is eager to get its tourism sector back to full-throttle after the country was entirely shut during the pandemic. One way to do this is to attract more tourists beyond the popular December to February months.

Tourism is typically its number-one employer, but overseas visitation is still around 20% off its pre-pandemic level. The destination was late to fully open to international travelers, having reopened its borders in July 2022. 

We spoke with Tourism New Zealand boss René de Monchy about the country’s recovery and push to draw more visitors beyond its summer.

There is a nice tailwind from a positive foreign exchange rate. The U.S. dollar has been strong relative to the New Zealand dollar. We had about 120% more American arrivals over the summer just gone compared with pre-pandemic. 

We are more connected to North America from a flight perspective than we were pre-Covid. Delta Airlines, which launched late last year, is flying to New Zealand for the first time ever.

We’ve had new routes open up, such as United Airlines flying San Francisco into Christchurch in the South Island, Auckland to New York, and American Airlines returning over our summer as well. 

We are still quite a seasonal destination, and our focus going forward will be on how we encourage people to travel year-round, with North Americans being one of the most seasonal. 

We acknowledged that at the end of this February summer, whilst we are still not a hundred percent of what we were, we see a strong trajectory, yields are up, and satisfaction is high.

We’re really focusing our attention on the challenge that has returned to the tourism sector, which is seasonality. So those three months are about 40% of the sector’s value spent in a quarter of the time.

You’ll see new work coming for us that will really highlight all the things that New Zealand has to offer because we’ve got to do quite a lot of myth-busting. Winter in New Zealand is quite different from winter in New York, even spring and Autumn.

So, lots of our activities in New Zealand are actually evergreen. The best time to go whale watching, for example, is June or July. 

We had Taika, a well-loved New Zealander, as a director and also an actor in that series. He was making that. I think it was the second or third series. They were filming it here in New Zealand.

As part of that, there’s an incentive for production companies to do that, and part of that is promoting New Zealand. So we spoke to him and said, look, here’s a nice idea to promote New Zealand, would you be interested? And he was really engaged, and it actually ended up being about a three-day shoot that involved him, and he obviously directed it with his talent.

He just brought his own kind of quirky