"Two years isn't long," she said.
"It sounds like heaps but then you think of all the places you want to visit and it doesn't seem long enough. To make it unlimited would be awesome and more people would travel if they didn't have to muck around with visas. We both work full time and we've been doing lawnmowing and weeding gardens to save up for it."
She said they each had to have $3500 in savings to meet visa requirements. If there was no visa needed they would also stay a lot longer.
"We'd probably never come back, to be honest."
The two-year limit meant lives changed in almost an instant, said former Rotorua resident Leigh Rogers. She worked as a primary school teacher for two years in London but couldn't get sponsorship to stay.
"This was an extremely difficult thing to do as I had a new partner, friends and life that I loved," she said.
"I had no choice but to leave it all and start from scratch. I would have given anything to have had the choice to stay longer. It took me a very long time to come to terms with leaving. And even though I'm okay with it now if I had the choice I would go back in a heartbeat."
She said she lived with her mum in Rotorua for three months after returning but ended up moving to Melbourne, where she is still living. "I wasn't ready to settle back in New Zealand, moving to Melbourne was like I was still travelling, experiencing the life I wanted to be living - only I'm allowed to live here without a visa."
Danielle Duchesne left the UK two weeks ago and is currently in Canada. She said she had heard about the proposal but was "trying not to get my hopes up of course, but to have that potential there is really helping the transition".
"Two years is enough time to settle properly into a rhythm, and to figure out what you want and get into the right headspace to continue pushing for your goals. This is how it was for me, I didn't feel okay in any sense to leave."