Coronavirus: Tourism NZ tackles possible $500m Chinese visitor gap

Monday, 10 February 2020

Coronavirus has turned off New Zealand's second largest tourism market virtually overnight.

Tourism New Zealand may look to North Americans and Australian skiers to make up for sharp plunge in Chinese visitors.

A week after New Zealand stopped travellers from China to help prevent spread of the coronavirus, Tourims New Zealand (TNZ) is tweaking its overseas marketing to try and regain a lot of lost ground.

TNZ chief executive Stephen England-Hall said the border closure was problematic because it came right at the busiest time for Chinese visitors and the industry had no idea when it would end.

'It's about a half a billion dollar impact on the tourism sector, assuming that Chinese arrivals fall to zero for two months, and then it takes another four months to get back to where we were before,' England-Hall said.

**READ MORE:

Smile Li with her father Li Yang were among the more than 400,000 Chinese who visited New Zealand last year. Over the 12 months to the end of November Chinese visitors spent $1.6 billion, about 5 per cent of total revenue from domestic and international tourism and roughly 0.6 per cent of annual GDP.

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'Whatever way you cut it, they're quite big numbers.'

One of the frustrations was the time lag in getting accurate data to see how travel trends were changing.

'We'd love to know what is going on right now in terms of actual numbers, how many people are boarding planes, how many people are buying tickets, how many people are arriving, not two months from now but right now.'

England-Hall said they did not know whether travellers forced to stay home would simply defer their trips here, or start their holiday planning from scratch.

'Imagine if you have spent $5000 a person on your holiday plans, that gets wiped out and you have no insurance to cover that. You're probably starting again. '

TNZ is working out which markets it should target in the short term between now and mid year, and in the longer term.

'But we're very mindful that Australia also has its 'stay here' campaign this year running promoting domestic tourism in Australia and we don't want to be seen to be unsupportive.'

However, selling New Zealand as a winter holiday destination for Australians is on the list, along with putting more emphasis on Canada and the United States which have been performing well and have direct flights here.

Post-Brexit Britain was another possibility.

Skydiving companies have done well out of Chinese tourists in recent years, but as of a week ago, that market has dried up. (File photo).

'We're looking at all those different options at the moment looking at where we can re-spread our relatively thin butter to see if it can have an effect.'

England-Hall said TNZ could reallocate promotional funding set aside for China and work within its existing budgets.

'That doesn't mean there are not people running around trying to figure out if there are things that could be done, but that's really outside our control. It sits with minister and other government agencies and they have to rank it against all their other priorities.'

TNZ is due to hold Kiwilink marketing events in Korea and Japan towards the end of the month and 17 tourism organisations have registered to attend.

England-Hall hoped the event would go ahead, but said issues such as health and safety of participants would need to be considered.

Korean arrivals - up 13 per cent in provisional statistics for the four weeks to January 5 - had been boosted by Air New Zealand flights to Seoul, and Japan was also improving. 'We'd just turned the corner.'

The fact that New Zealand has not had a case of coronavirus could work in our favour if that situation remains, but England-Hall said it was too early to tell if nervousness about long haul travel would mean more people chose to holiday at home, or avoided long haul flights.

'Given previous behaviour those markets [Japan and Korea] tend to be a bit more susceptible to external change and risk than others, so our expectation is there will be, but we haven't seen it yet.'