It’s Thursday, and the question running through almost every item today is the same one: who pays for the infrastructure visitors use. Here’s what’s moving.
Tourism Industry Aotearoa refreshed Tourism 2050 at Te Puia, and put funding at the top of it
Tourism Industry Aotearoa relaunched its 25-year strategy, Tourism 2050 - A Blueprint for Impact, at Te Puia in Rotorua yesterday, in front of about 80 of its roughly 1,200 member businesses. The document first appeared in 2023. The refresh keeps the ten-action structure, the te ao Māori principles and the balanced growth model, and updates the actions for stronger global competition, more frequent disruption, climate change, changed visitor expectations and artificial intelligence.
One of those ten actions is funding at a national level so the cost of tourism does not land on ratepayers, and the strategy is blunt that the current arrangement is deficient and impeding growth. Chief executive Rebecca Ingram wants the conversation about industry funding, how the international visitor levy is used and potential new national mechanisms to stay on the table, and points to an imbalance between what central government collects from tourism and what local government has to spend. The ask of the political parties is that they commit to the strategy.
The timing is the story. National ruled out an accommodation levy on Sunday under a no-new-taxes commitment, so the industry published its blueprint into an election campaign in which the largest party has already declined the mechanism the blueprint asks for. Rotorua mayor Tania Tapsell, whose district hosted the launch and took two million visitors last year, told the room the reversal was a “180-degree U-turn” and that the conversation was not finished. A strategy with a 25-year horizon has to survive an eleven-week campaign first.
Stat of the day
$46.6b
Total tourism expenditure in New Zealand in the year to March 2025, 7.7 percent of GDP, supporting 327,888 jobs. That is the pie the funding argument is about. (Stats NZ, Tourism Satellite Account)
Source: RNZ · TIA · NZ Herald · Stats NZ
Winston Peters says the bed tax is still government policy, which is not what National said on Sunday
New Zealand First leader Winston Peters posted on Tuesday that accommodation levies in Auckland and Queenstown remain on the table, because the signed Auckland Regional Deal commits the government to consider them in 2027 and nothing about that has changed. Other parties can campaign on reneging if they wish, he said, but “a deal is a deal”. His party’s position is that international visitors should be open to a levy that funds tourism infrastructure, and that a levy can be built to apply only to them.
That last point is aimed squarely at National finance spokesperson Nicola Willis, whose objection to an accommodation levy is that it would catch New Zealanders booking a holiday. Auckland mayor Wayne Brown has said the regional deal is meaningless if the commitment to explore a levy is not honoured. Labour leader Chris Hipkins asked what a signature from the Prime Minister is now worth to a mayor. ACT leader David Seymour accepts the government could theoretically consider it, and opposes new taxes anyway. Four positions, one coalition, and a signed document that says 2027.
Underneath the constitutional argument is a plumbing one. Mackenzie district has about 5,500 ratepayers and visitor numbers well above pre-pandemic levels, and mayor Scott Aronsen says the single public toilet at Burkes Pass runs at capacity and has drawn Environment Canterbury warnings for exceeding its consent limits. His council brought in user-pays toilet charges in April and proposed paid parking in three centres the same month. His complaint about the international visitor levy is not that it is too small, but that it goes to the Department of Conservation estate rather than to the districts carrying the roads, toilets and wastewater. Which brings us to the last item.
Christchurch Airport made a record $96.3 million and will send $38.6 million of it to the city council
Christchurch Airport reported its FY26 result yesterday, for the year to 30 June. Reported net profit after tax was $96.3 million against $74.8 million, up 28.8 percent. Underlying operating profit after tax, the number the company leads with, was $64.9 million against $49.7 million, up 30.6 percent. Revenue reached $273.0 million from $245 million, up 11.4 percent. Passengers hit 6.85 million, up 7.1 percent, split into 5.09 million domestic, up 5.4 percent, and 1.76 million international, up 12.6 percent.
The dividend is $51.5 million for the year, $6.8 million more than last year, made up of a $24.1 million interim paid in April and a $27.4 million final due after the annual meeting in October. The airport is 75 percent owned by Christchurch City Council through Christchurch City Holdings and 25 percent by the Crown, so $38.625 million of that goes to the council and $12.875 million to the Crown. Chief executive Justin Watson called it a year when a lot of long-term work came together, pointing to the memorandum of understanding with Air New Zealand behind three new long-haul routes, the completed Kōwhai Park solar farm now in activation, the new freight hub, and the terminal retail and food work.
Read the two halves of the day together and the picture is uncomfortable rather than contradictory. One council is being paid $38.6 million a year by its airport while other councils argue they have no durable way to fund visitor infrastructure at all. It is not a template. Very few districts own an airport at this scale, the dividend is already committed inside Christchurch’s rates settings, and Mackenzie’s 5,500 ratepayers are not going to build one. It does show what a visitor economy can generate when a council happens to own the asset at the front of it.
Source: Christchurch Airport · RNZ
Two more council-owned airports are backing land and sunshine over landing fees
Rotorua Airport has lodged a resource consent application with Bay of Plenty Regional Council for earthworks across about 5.65 hectares, to prepare the site for a business park that has been on its books for two decades. The works cover a taxiway connection, road access, water, wastewater and other services, and an upgrade to the southern refuelling area, moving about 7,322 cubic metres of soil with roughly 4,744 cubic metres reused as fill. Consent is required because the earthworks exceed regional plan limits, and because site investigations found low concentrations of PFAS and naturally occurring arsenic in parts of the development area. The park was costed at $26.7 million in 2020 and the current estimate is being withheld as commercially sensitive. Chief executive Nicole Brewer calls a fit-for-purpose business park a “long-term aspiration”, with stage 1A due mid-2027 if approvals come through. The airport is owned by Rotorua Lakes Council and has run as a council-controlled organisation since 2008.
On the same day, Hawke’s Bay Airport opened an expression of interest process for delivery and co-investment partners in a 12 to 17 megawatt solar farm on 24 hectares of airport land northwest of the runways, enough for the annual electricity use of roughly 3,000 Hawke’s Bay households. Feasibility, consenting, engineering and community engagement run over the next twelve months. That airport is 50 percent Crown, 26 percent Napier City Council and 24 percent Hastings District Council, and chief executive Nick Flack frames the project around aviation needing far more renewable electricity by 2050 than it draws today.
Neither of these is really an aviation story. Regional airports at these passenger volumes cannot fund themselves on aeronautical charges, so they become landlords and generators instead, and the flying rides on the property. Christchurch has been doing exactly this at scale for years, and its result yesterday is what it looks like once it works.
Source: NZ Herald · Rotorua Airport · Hawke’s Bay Airport release, via Scoop
$9.7 million of visitor levy money is going to goats and deer across six conservation areas
Conservation Minister Tama Potaka announced on Tuesday a four-year, $9.7 million package from the International Visitor Conservation and Tourism Levy for wild goat and deer control. It covers Whanganui National Park and the Waitōtara Conservation Area in the North Island, and Kahurangi, Nelson Lakes, Westland Tai Poutini and Fiordland national parks in the South.
The work is specific rather than general. Goat control and monitoring continue in Whanganui and expand in Waitōtara. Kahurangi gets its goat-free country defended, including around the Heaphy Track. Nelson Lakes is targeted for elimination, Westland Tai Poutini for intensified eradication, and Fiordland for deer. Potaka’s framing is that unchecked goats and deer do significant damage and hit productivity for farmers and other land managers. The Department of Conservation runs wild animal management across roughly 1.2 million hectares of public conservation land, so this is a focused allocation rather than a national programme.
It is also the levy behaving exactly as designed, and exactly as Mackenzie’s mayor described it. Around $2.4 million a year, spread across six areas, aimed at browsing pressure on native vegetation in the places the country sells hardest. Whether that is the right call is a separate question from the one the mayors are asking, which is what happens to the toilet at Burkes Pass. The visitor levy was never built to answer that, and after Sunday there is no other instrument in front of the voters that is.
Coming up
- Today, 27 August West Coast Tourism Summit at Monteith’s Brewery, Greymouth, and Tourism Volumes and Flows for July
- 28 August Air New Zealand FY26 annual results before the market opens, July Monthly Regional Tourism Estimates on the revised basis, Development West Coast’s support for the Wellington to Westport service runs out, and Titanic: The Human Story opens in Auckland
- 28 August to 3 September The North Face Frontier at The Remarkables, Queenstown
- 29 August Crown Princess opens Auckland’s cruise season at Queens Wharf
- 31 August The new runway end safety area rule takes effect, and submissions close at 5pm on the Wānaka freedom camping bylaw changes
- Week of 31 August Originair meets ministers on changing the criteria for regional development funding
- 1 September International Visitor Survey for the June quarter, the general whitebait season opens, and Avani Queenstown opens
- 13 September Auckland’s City Rail Link opens to passengers
- October Christchurch Airport’s annual meeting, after which the $27.4 million final dividend is paid, and SkyCity’s annual meeting
- 7 October Last day to submit draft group, tour escort and ADS FIT visa applications started in the old Immigration Online system
- 26 October Air New Zealand becomes the first international airline into Western Sydney Airport
- 7 November General election
- Mid-2027 Stage 1A of Rotorua Airport’s business park due to be complete, if consents are granted
- 2027 The Auckland Regional Deal’s commitment to consider accommodation levies falls due
That's today's briefing. The Shoulder Season is back every weekday morning.