Kiwis making fewer but longer overseas trips

Kiwis took fewer but longer overseas trips in the April 2023 year compared with before the pandemic, according to Stats NZ.

New Zealand-resident travellers spent an average of 24 days overseas in the April 2023 year.

Before the pandemic, Kiwi travellers spent an average of 19 days abroad in the April 2019 year.

“Of New Zealand residents travelling overseas, the proportion away for three weeks or more has increased from one in four in 2019 to one in three in 2023,” Stats NZ population indicators manager Tehseen Islam said today.

Of the 210,400 New Zealand-resident travellers who arrived in April, 46 per cent returned from Australia, well ahead of any other country,

The next most common points of origin were Fiji, the USA, India, China, the Cook Islands and the UK.

For the month of April, overseas visitor arrivals numbered 221,300, well up from 167,000 a year earlier.

The biggest drivers of that increase were Australians, Americans, Chinese, British and Indian visitors.

The April 2023 visitor arrival numbers were still below levels seen shortly before the pandemic.

In April 2019, almost a quarter of a million (243,300) overseas visitors arrived.

Of the overseas visitor arrivals in April this year, 49 per cent were from Australia, compared with 43 per cent four years earlier.

US visitors also made up a higher percentage last April than four years earlier, according to Stats NZ.

But only 5 per cent of recent visitors were from China, compared to 12 per cent in April 2019.

ASB economists said tourism inflows into New Zealand seemed to have plateaued, with Chinese visitor numbers still low.

“The desire to travel remains strong post-Covid-19 and we expect annual tourism arrivals to trend higher, but for a lower annual peak than seemed the case a few months ago,” the bank economists added.

“With resident departures out of New Zealand still ticking up, this could mean a lower net boost to the New Zealand economy than earlier assumed.”