The Shoulder Season A daily read on New Zealand tourism

Thursday 10 September 2026

A government review found 24 things wrong with hospitality regulation, and put a date on none of them

The Ministry for Regulation's hospitality review landed with 24 recommendations and no timetable, Tourism New Zealand put $820,000 behind a campaign to win 5,000 more people coming to see their relatives, Auckland's rail network changes on Sunday but opens on a reduced service, Snow Machine starts in Queenstown today, and Canterbury businesses say they are hiring again.

By the Shoulder Season desk

A yacht on the harbour with the Sky Tower behind, Auckland
Photo by Eric Feng on Unsplash

It’s Thursday, and the biggest document of the week is a regulatory review that names 24 problems and dates none of the fixes. Here’s what’s moving.

The hospitality regulatory review landed with 24 recommendations and no timetable

The Ministry for Regulation released its hospitality sector regulatory review yesterday. It covers restaurants, bars, clubs, cafes, market food stalls, food trucks, caterers and hotels, and how all of them deal with regulators, mostly councils. The finding is that the rules do protect public health and safety, and that getting through them is costly, slow and repetitive.

The specifics are the useful part, because they are the sort of thing an operator can recognise. Businesses hand the same information to the same regulator more than once. Decision timeframes are open-ended, so nobody can plan around them. Alcohol licensing and renewals are inefficient and not proportionate to actual risk. Fees are neither transparent nor tied to what the regulator spends. Food safety enforcement is applied inconsistently. Putting up a temporary marquee runs into building consent. The 24 recommendations follow from that list: standard national application forms, a lower-risk classification for lower-risk businesses, an end to annual and biennial renewals, an overhaul of alcohol licensing, and a review of exemptions for temporary structures.

The review is not a light-touch piece of work. It drew 247 written submissions and involved 13 sector groups, 27 District Licensing Committees, 12 territorial authorities and 21 businesses across several regions. Regulation Minister David Seymour said red tape and “dumb rules” made it hard for the sector to recover. Tourism and Hospitality Minister Louise Upston said the Government is “backing Kiwi businesses and supporting a stronger visitor economy”, and will fold the priorities into a Hospitality Action Plan.

Here is the gap. Seymour said all 24 recommendations will be implemented eventually, and put no timeline on any of them. The Hospitality Action Plan has no publication date either. The House rises on 24 September and Parliament is dissolved on 1 October, so between now and the 7 November election there is no legislative time for any of this. That does not make the review worthless, because a good deal of it is administrative rather than statutory and could move through agencies. It does mean an operator budgeting for lower licensing costs should budget for 2027 at the earliest, and only then if the next government picks the plan up.

It is also the second set of hospitality recommendations in eight days. Hospitality New Zealand and the Restaurant Association published their own summit report on 3 September, and the Action Plan is now the document meant to reconcile the industry’s asks with the Government’s.

Stat of the day

24

Recommendations in the hospitality regulatory review, covering a sector of more than 25,000 businesses, $21.4 billion of revenue and over 193,000 employees. The Regulation Minister says all 24 will be implemented, without saying when. (Ministry for Regulation)

Source: Ministry for Regulation · RNZ · Beehive

Tourism New Zealand is spending $164 a head to get 5,000 more people to visit their relatives

Tourism New Zealand launched a campaign yesterday called Don’t be a Stranger, aimed at Australia, the United Kingdom and Canada. It targets people who already have friends or family here, and the pitch is to turn the trip they were probably going to make anyway into a longer, wider one. Marketing general manager Brodie McLeish described the aim as turning “a chance to reconnect into a richer holiday”.

The reason to take this seriously is the size of the segment. Tourism New Zealand puts visits to friends and relatives at about 30 percent of all international arrivals and $2.6 billion a year, and says close to half of Australian arrivals are in that category. That is the second-largest visitor market in the country and it is one nobody has to persuade to fly.

Now the arithmetic, because the headline number does a lot of work.

Two cross-checks on that $3,280. Tourism New Zealand’s own figures for the year to June were 3.7 million arrivals delivering $14.3 billion, which is about $3,865 an arrival, so the campaign assumes each extra visitor is worth roughly 85 percent of the current all-market average. But apply the same treatment to the segment being targeted, and 30 percent of 3.7 million arrivals is about 1.11 million people generating $2.6 billion, or about $2,340 each. On those numbers the campaign assumes its extra 5,000 spend around 40 percent more than the average visiting-friends-and-family traveller does today.

That is not a contradiction, it is the whole strategy stated as a number. The campaign is not trying to add trips, it is trying to make existing trips wider and longer, so a higher per-head figure is exactly what success would look like. It is worth naming as an assumption rather than a result, because the $16.4 million is a forecast built on it. The measurable part is the 5,000 arrivals.

For operators, the practical read is that this money is being spent to push a group that traditionally stays in a spare room out into paid experiences, in the months before the peak. If you sell day activities near a main centre with a large expatriate population, that is your campaign.

Source: RNZ

Auckland’s rail network changes on Sunday, and it opens on a reduced timetable

The City Rail Link opens to passengers on Sunday 13 September, with the first weekday timetable on Monday 14 September. Two new underground stations come into service, Te Waihorotiu in midtown near the Sky Tower and Karanga-a-Hape off Karangahape Road, connected by 3.45 kilometres of twin tunnel running as deep as 42 metres. Britomart becomes Waitematā and stops being a dead end, and Mt Eden becomes Maungawhau. The project has cost $5.5 billion, against $4.4 billion estimated in 2019 and $2.9 billion when early works started in 2016.

For anyone who writes itineraries or briefs guests, two things change on Sunday. Midtown and Karangahape Road get stations, which is the first time a visitor staying near Aotea Square can be told to take a train rather than walk from Britomart or find a bus. And journeys from the west stop reversing at Newmarket, which is where the headline time savings come from: Auckland Transport has Henderson to Te Waihorotiu at 35 minutes, about 24 minutes faster than the same trip today.

The caution is the service level. The network opens on a transitional timetable, not the one it was designed around. Most suburban stations get six trains an hour at peak rather than the eight that were tested, trains run through the tunnel every four minutes at peak, and off-peak gaps stretch to 15 minutes. Do not describe it to a guest as turn-up-and-go outside the peaks yet. Bus timetables across east, south, west and central Auckland have been adjusted to connect with the new pattern, and Auckland Transport will have extra staff on stations on the day.

Source: City Rail Link · Auckland Transport · 1News

Snow Machine opens in Queenstown today, at the end of the season rather than the middle of it

Snow Machine runs today through Saturday 12 September, its fifth Queenstown edition, across Coronet Peak, The Remarkables and a main arena in town. The festival’s own programme is eight stages and more than 30 artists.

The number worth holding is from two years ago rather than this one. Co-owner Quentin Nolan told the New Zealand Herald in September 2024 that the festival drew about 7,500 people, mostly Australians, and put roughly $20 million into Queenstown across the week. No 2026 figure has been published, so treat that as the last verified benchmark rather than a forecast for this weekend.

What makes it interesting for everyone outside Queenstown is the timing. July, the month that is supposed to carry the winter, went backwards: the July regional estimates had Queenstown’s domestic spend down 14.4 percent. Meanwhile a privately promoted music event has built a reliable few thousand Australian arrivals into the second week of September, after the peak, using ski fields that were already there and had spare capacity. Cardrona has just extended to 18 October for the same reason and Mount Cheeseman closed on 3 September for the opposite one.

The transferable point is not that everyone should run a festival. It is that the demand being manufactured here sits deliberately in the weeks either side of the season, which is the part of the calendar the rest of the industry spends public money trying to fill.

Source: Snow Machine · NZ Herald, September 2024

Two thirds of Canterbury businesses expect to hire, in a year 2,900 hospitality businesses stopped trading

Business Canterbury released its Quarterly Canterbury Business Survey on Tuesday. Confidence in the regional economy has jumped: 72 percent of firms expect Canterbury to be stronger over the next 12 months, up 20 points since May, and the same proportion expect their own performance to improve, up 12 points. Investment intentions sit at 71 percent, hiring intentions at 68 percent, and 77 percent say they are confident of handling disruption. Chief executive Leeann Watson read it as businesses focusing on “long-term opportunity rather than short-term uncertainty”.

Handle this one carefully, because it is not a tourism number. The survey covers all sectors and the release breaks out none of them, so nothing in it says accommodation or attractions specifically are hiring. What it does give is a regional counterweight to a run of national figures that have been uniformly bad, including Centrix’s count of 2,900 hospitality businesses ceasing to trade in a year at an insolvency rate 3.3 times the national average.

Christchurch is also the city where a lot of the sector’s next 12 months physically happen. Tourism Summit Aotearoa and the New Zealand Tourism Awards are both at Te Pae on 4 November, TRENZ returns there in May 2027, the Sheraton conversion is due in 2027, and Air New Zealand starts direct services to Singapore, Narita and Perth between late October and the end of November. If regional confidence is real, that is a reasonable place for it to show up first.

Source: Business Canterbury via Scoop

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