Judy Chen: Country needs our help to stay postcard perfect

We must continue to look after our country both for our people and for the visitors. Photo / Warren Buckland

Opinion

COMMENT: The summer holidays are upon us and so is the peak of the tourism season. For many, the summer break means long, lazy days of doing not much, visiting friends and relatives and enjoying the enviable New Zealand lifestyle and landscapes that we so often take for granted.

Some of us will be in remoter parts of the country where "out-of-towners" are a rarity and the longest queue is for ice cream. For others, their summer holiday destination or even their home town may not be quite as it used to be because, increasingly, it is being shared with international visitors who (just once) want to experience what we have available to us 24/7.

Just like you, I get concerned when I hear the stories about freedom camping, overcrowding and, most recently, the hot "Instagrammable" spots around the country that are proving just a little too popular.

Our association and members regularly discuss what our patch of paradise will look like after the summer season ends and the bulk of our visitors head home with memories of New Zealand in their minds and on their social media feeds.

Naturally, we want visitors to keep coming, but the sector also acknowledges that everything is not always awesome in tourism and we have a duty of care to make sure the places that are so attractive to visitors are not undone by these same people.

Visitors to our country don't wilfully cause damage. As a result of the growing tourism numbers it has been acknowledged that tourism infrastructure is lacking, including public toilets.

The Tourism Infrastructure Fund has gone some way to remedying that problem along with carparking, rubbish management and other unsexy topics that have to be addressed.

This is vital because, if it's not remedied, both our visitors and our experience of our own country will be tarnished by simple housekeeping issues.

In a sure sign of our evolution as an industry our business strategies are no longer focused purely on getting more visitors through the door.

This might have been the case 15-20 years ago, but with 3.7 million visitors in the last 12 months we can safely say we have achieved that goal.

The recently released draft Tourism Strategy also reflects this, saying we need to take a more considered approach and look at how we sustain and manage tourism so it continues to benefit us all.

This means dispersing visitors to lesser-known parts of the country to ease pressure on the hotspots and pushing the tourism dollar into regions that haven't benefited as much as others. This makes good sense but we need to be careful that we don't disperse the problems as well as the money. Before we point visitors into the regions, let's make sure that the infrastructure is there to support them.

As we look down the barrel of another busy summer season we do so with care, aware that we must continue to look after our country both for our people and for the visitors who make their way here for those once-in-a-lifetime memories.

• Judy Chen is chief executive of the Tourism Export Council of New Zealand.