Do we want tourists with 'budgets of $20 a day' back when the borders reopen?

Friday, 25 March 2022

Overcrowding in the wilderness and human waste on roadsides – will the ugly side of tourism return when international borders reopen, or will Tourism Minister Stuart Nash deliver his promise of a new-look sector? Joanne Naish reports.

During the first Covid-19 lockdown, Peter and Justine Salter took a table and chairs and set up for a morning coffee in the middle of State Highway 6.

It was March 2020 and the steady throng of thousands of tourists passing by their door every day had suddenly ground to a halt.

About 12 months earlier, the couple had become embroiled in a campaign against a Westland District Council freedom camping site on the remote beach near their property, set up with toilets and rubbish facilities from the Government Tourism Infrastructure Fund, in turn funded by the International Tourism Levy – which is $35 per visitor.

As many as 50 campers were arriving each night at the site, near the Waitaha River mouth, despite only 15 vehicles being allowed at any one time. So the Salters and a small group of community members decided to blockade the bridge to the beach to enforce the cap.

The Government will open the border to Australian tourists on April 12 and tourists from visa-waiver countries like the United States and UK on May 1. It has said it will reopen to the rest of the world possibly before October, when it initially planned to reopen.

**READ MORE:

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* Freedom camping laws need reform but foreign tourists aren't the only villains

**

According to Statistics New Zealand, ​3.86 million visitors arrived at our shores between January and December 2018 and spent $16.2 billion.

More than 110,000 of those visitors were freedom campers, but the figure rose to 245,000 in 2019. Mainly from Australia and Europe, their ‘pitch up and park anywhere for the night’ approach led to tensions with local residents.

Peter Salter said some tourists had become a nuisance for many New Zealand communities.

“They were like parasites. We spoke to some and they were on budgets of $20 a day. Some of them would work but only for three months and then spend nine months scrounging around the country. They didn’t respect the country,” he said.

Salter said he was enjoying the quieter roads since the arrival of Covid-19.

“You don’t have to worry about going around a bend and meeting a car coming at you on the wrong side of the road for one thing,” he said.

He would be in favour of introducing a fee for international visitors to visit national parks and welcomed the changes to the freedom camping rules which meant it will be easier to enforce vans to be properly self-contained.

It will set minimum standards for campers and subject those who break the rules to tougher fines.

The legislation is part of Tourism Minister Stuart Nash’s plan for a new-look tourism sector when New Zealand opens up to the world again.

In March 2021, Nash promised “fundamental change” to repair damage caused to New Zealand’s 100 per cent pure image by issues such as freedom campers parking on private driveways, overcrowding, littering and human waste on the sides of roads and on tracks.

Nash previously said while mass-scale international tourism was unlikely before 2022, he was considering potential next steps, like raising the tourist levy and “pricing strategies” for national parks, so international tourism was more financially sustainable.

Research by Tourism Industry Aotearoa and Tourism NZ showed that even within tourism hotspots like Queenstown, as many as 79 per cent of residents felt there was too much pressure from international visitors.

“In essence, tourism was beginning to lose its social licence to operate and we were running the very real risk of not being able to deliver on our global value proposition behind ‘Brand NZ’,” Nash said.

He set up a working group to come up with an Industry Transformation Plan made up of tourism operators, government agencies, workers’ groups, and iwi, which will deliver a draft Better Work Action Plan for consultation this year.

The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment's report ‘Not 100% - but four steps closer to sustainable tourism’ says business-as-usual growth had the potential to undermine the very thing that New Zealand’s tourism industry is based on – the quality of our natural environment.

Nash said tourism at the UNESCO World Heritage site Milford Sound-Piopiotahi could not return to its pre-Covid state.

Significant pressure from 870,000 annual visitors threatened cultural and environmental values and infrastructure in Fiordland National Park, and impacted on the visitor experience.

“We can’t waste this opportunity to make real change. We won’t waste this opportunity to make real change.”

The Milford Opportunities Project (MOP) launched its ambitious master plan it had worked on for four years for Milford Sound Piopiotahi, the Milford corridor and the region in July – one of its most controversial suggestions was to close the Milford airstrip.

It proposed to charge international visitors an access fee, but the final decisions rest with the Government.

A ministerial group is overseeing a new board and a dedicated unit which is working through recommendations with iwi input.

Visitor numbers peaked in 2019 with 870,000 visitors through Milford Sound, up from 430,000 in 2013 – which most agreed were unsustainable.

Totally Tourism boss Mark Quickfall, who operates helicopter and tourism ventures in Queenstown, Milford Sound and the West Coast said previous surveys showed 94 per cent of tourists were satisfied with their Milford Sound experience.

“I want any decisions to be made based on facts. Let’s not make rash decisions. When MOP did a survey 84 per cent supported retention of the airport. It’s not a fait accompli,” he said.

While some Queenstown residents liked the less-congested version of the resort post-Covid, with fewer helicopters buzzing overhead, he was not so sure.

“I’ve lived in Queenstown for 40 years and it’s always been a place you either love or love to hate. Yes, you can now drive into town and find a park, but it's lost its mojo or vibrancy,” he said.

Quickfall has been in the industry for 40 year and has heard talk of a more sustainable tourism industry many times before.

“I have seen many plans come and go. They get put on a shelf to gather dust,” he said.

Dale Burrows of Franz Josef Wilderness Tours agrees.

He said while tourism operators were desperate to see tourists back, they acknowledged the issues mass tourism had caused in the past.

“It's a catch 22. It’s a really tough situation. We have had two terrible years and we want to try and recover as quickly as possible and make a living. It’s all very well talking about reimagining tourism, but I really struggle to see what that looks like. It’s all just been talk,” he said.

He said New Zealand could not pick and choose only high-end tourists because businesses needed backpackers who worked in seasonal jobs like hospitality and fruit-picking.

Visitor spending in Glacier Country has fallen from $39.7m pre-Covid to just $12.4m in 2021, according to data from Development West Coast (DWC).

Federated Mountain Clubs president Jan Finlayson said the organisation was “tepid” on the tourism levy and thought considering how much tourists spent in New Zealand, GST was a more appropriate funding mechanism.

She said she was opposed to anyone being charged to access Conservation land, including National Parks.

“Everybody should be treated equally on public conservation land and there should be no ‘have’ and ‘have-nots’.”

Development West Coast chief executive Heath Milne came into the role in January 2020 and said straight away began hearing from tourism industry representatives and the community that there were too many tourists.

“The industry has had an unbelievably tough time, but I don’t see any return to the sheer numbers we saw back in 2019. I don’t think we should be going back to that because of the issues we had,” he said.

Issues included congestion on the roads and communities struggling to clean up after freedom campers.

Pre-Covid tourists only spent an average of 1.4 nights on the West Coast – a region the same length as the North Island.

Destination and Tourism Manager Patrick Dault said Development West Coast and the 25 other Regional Tourism organisations in New Zealand were working on Destination Management Plans, as part of a $47m Government fund to help regions come up with what a reimagined tourism should look like.

“The feedback from operators was they wanted a social licence to operate, they wanted to look after the environment and they wanted a sustainable model,” he said.

Its plan would be published in May.

“We need balance. We aspire for the recovery not to be like pre-Covid days. We don't want the same number of people… We want fewer tourists to spend longer on the Coast and to engage with our stories,” he said.

“We don’t just want high value tourism, we want high values tourism,” he said.

Wilderness Lodge owner Gerry McSweeney believed operators needed to do more to encourage visitors to stay longer to experience more than just a helicopter ride over the glaciers.

”We had it all wrong. What Covid has done is great for the West Coast because it made people realise what the Coast has got to offer, not least the people who live here,” he said.