KEY POINTS:
The recent Herald article on the issues facing the tourism industry and how tourism has been riding high in recent years, prospering on the successes of cinema, sport and our clean, green image is oh so true. But it's not all rosy out there, particularly in the tour-guiding sector.
ProGuidesNZ hears from its membership that the increased free independent travel (FIT) mode is putting pressure on New Zealand-based tour guides' livelihood.
In recent years, ProGuidesNZ members have seen the amount of tour-coach guiding work diminish. This has been noticeable in the German and Japanese markets, sectors which traditionally made up a large proportion of coach travellers.
The German market, whilst increasing this year, is still many thousands of arrivals a year less than in the peak of 1996; likewise the Japanese market, now down to around 5 per cent of the market mix.
The ongoing shift to free independent travel has meant that many tour-group bookings don't eventuate because of minimal passenger numbers.
Many of the longstanding New Zealand-based tour guides have had to buy expensive passenger endorsement licences to become driver/guides and essentially do two jobs in one. Today, a tour-group booking might be more like six or 16, compared with 36 clients on a coach.
As a relatively invisible player in the tourism industry, tour guides are active participants and silent observers of the changes in the country's landscape, hospitality and tourism industries. They have seen a paradigm shift - from the clean, green, sheep-filled paradise at the end of the world - into a "sheepless, cultivated green" country filled with dairy cows, irrigation systems, fences clogged with plastic rubbish and piles of rusting, derelict cars on the entrances to our rural townships.
Godzone - so often ranked first for natural beauty, and lauded for its clean, green image.
While successful for so many reasons, Tourism New Zealand's 100 per cent Pure New Zealand branding programme has potentially given a false impression to free independent travellers that the entire Kiwi outdoors is waiting for the taking.
The new volumes of free independent travellers not only mean fewer coaches but also more incidents and costly accidents on the road, more frustration as these vehicles slow down traffic on the roads, greater demand for facilities to contain effluent and toilet waste from campervans and freedom travellers. Not to mention more emissions, more fuel consumption and more strain on the environment.
The Department of Conservation is doing a good job with the resources it has to educate and contain the independent-travel traffic. But DoC is also putting pressure on the New Zealand tour-guiding industry to conform to something which is all but impossible.
For a couple of years, DoC has been policing tour guides accompanying organised coach tours which venture onto the conservation margins and front-country tracks.
They used to have the freedom to stop and take photos, casually stroll along a coastal or bush-clad walkway, but this has since become a punishable offence for the tour guide without a concession.
ProGuidesNZ is working with DoC, and the Bus & Coach Association, to overcome this issue, which would otherwise leave its members facing fines for not having concessions to move around the country.
In the meantime, however, people in campervans pull up anywhere they want, take the photos, walk the walks and move on to the next spot, hopefully with their rubbish and effluent still on board.
We are not against free independent travel or campervan tourist traffic. But in order to survive, our tour guides need a tidier playing field to play on. We are hopeful the concession issue will be concluded in the not too distant future, and we also need a shift in the marketing of New Zealand as a place to share in the company of others, not some free-for-all playground ripe for the picking.
We also challenge the tour industry planners to produce more congenial itineraries for coach travel that will encourage people back on the buses with itineraries that are legally manageable, have fewer miles on the road, and more quality time in fewer places.
After all, the recent talk of air miles is really only jargon and empty words unless we do something about it now. Putting more emphasis on coach travel as a transport-mode of choice today - one which reduces the number of campervan wheels on the seal - would be the first step to cementing New Zealand's image as a clean, green, sustainable tourism destination.
* Claudia Duffy is the chairwoman of ProGuidesNZ, a tour guiding association.
