The Shoulder Season A daily read on New Zealand tourism

Monday 26 October 2026

Air New Zealand lands the first international flight at Western Sydney, and Franz Josef's river buffer shrinks from ten years to three

Air New Zealand opens a second Sydney door, card data shows travellers paying 22 percent more per airline purchase, the Waiho River moves faster than its planners, Cornwall Park starts charging for parking, and summer hiring starts early but carefully.

By the Shoulder Season desk

Sunlit rain falling across a mountain valley at Arthur's Pass
Photo by Tyler Lastovich on Unsplash

It’s Labour Day Monday, and while most of the country drove home, one Air New Zealand jet opened a new airport. Here’s what’s moving.

Air New Zealand becomes the first international airline to land at Western Sydney

Air New Zealand flight NZ165 from Auckland touched down at Western Sydney International Airport at 7.28am today, making it the first international passenger airline into Sydney’s new airport, RNZ reported. The aircraft turned around in about an hour and a half for the return leg. Flights run Monday, Wednesday and Friday until the end of March 2027, then shift to Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday from April.

The airport sits at Luddenham, about 45 kilometres west of Sydney’s central business district, and it runs 24 hours a day with no curfew, a point local residents have fought hard. For New Zealand that location is the story. Until today a Tasman trip from Sydney’s western suburbs began with a cross-city journey to Kingsford Smith. A closer airport makes a short break in Auckland, and onward connections from it, easier to sell to a large catchment that has had to travel the length of the city to fly anywhere.

Three flights a week is a toe in the water, not a route that will shift visitor numbers on its own. But being first into a new airport is cheap positioning, and an airport with no curfew gives an airline timetable options that Sydney’s main airport cannot.

Stat of the day

45 km

How far west of Sydney's central business district the new airport sits, at Luddenham, putting a Tasman flight within easy reach of Western Sydney's suburbs. (RNZ)

Source: RNZ

Card data shows airline spending up 16 percent on fewer purchases, so Christmas flying will cost more

Card spending data from Dot Loves Data, reported by RNZ, shows spending on airlines up 15.92 percent on a year earlier while the number of transactions fell 5.28 percent. Put together, the average airline transaction is up 22.32 percent on 2025. Economist Benje Patterson told RNZ that domestic flights booked in September cost 5.1 percent more than a year earlier and international fares 12.3 percent more, with jet fuel the main driver. Air New Zealand said higher fares had offset some, but not all, of its fuel bill, and that early bookers get the best prices.

Read with Friday’s inflation figures, the pattern is consistent: New Zealanders are flying a little less and paying a lot more each time. Patterson’s view is that domestic travellers will stay cautious this summer, but that strong growth in international arrivals, which Auckland and Christchurch airports expect to continue through the season, should help operators who sell to both markets. Operators who rely on New Zealanders flying to them for a short break are the ones most exposed to the fare line.

Source: RNZ

The Waiho River is changing course years early, and Franz Josef’s ten-year buffer is down to about three

An independent technical advisory group appointed by the West Coast Regional Council told a public meeting in Franz Josef on Wednesday that the Waiho River is changing course three or four years earlier than forecast, RNZ reported. Spokesperson Professor Ian Fuller of Massey University called the risk to life without action “potentially catastrophic”, and the group asked for urgent central government funding and preparation for a managed retreat. Westland Mayor Helen Lash said a 2023 assessment that expanding the stopbanks would buy about ten years now looks more like three.

The group’s earlier advice was to release the river’s southern stopbanks within ten years and let it spread across the flats. That would flood farmland and mean moving State Highway 6 and the town’s wastewater ponds, and abandoning the local aerodrome. Lash’s multi-agency working group aims to put a formal proposal to ministers early next year.

Franz Josef is one of the West Coast’s two glacier towns, and its visitor economy runs on the highway and the air. SH6 is the only road through, and scenic and heli-hike flights are a mainstay of the town’s visitor offering. No dollar figure has been put on the work, and RNZ’s report does not deal with tourism directly, but every option on the table touches the two things the town’s visitor trade depends on. A decision that slips past the next election and into 2027 is a decision made with less of that three-year margin left.

Source: RNZ

Cornwall Park will charge for parking from 1 December, with the first two hours free

The Cornwall Park Trust will introduce paid parking in parts of the Auckland park and along Pūriri Drive from 1 December, RNZ reported. The first two hours stay free. After that it costs $5 an hour on weekdays, capped at $35 a day, and $2.50 an hour on weekends and public holidays, capped at $20. There will still be 300 free all-day spaces on Grand Drive and Bollard Avenue. The park gets about two million visits a year, and about 70 percent last less than two hours.

Chief executive Murray Reade said the aim is turnover and fair access at busy times, with the money going to maintenance and the visitor experience. That makes it another example of a free attraction looking to the car park for revenue, alongside the visitor levies and parking charges councils have been adding at popular sites. The design is worth noting: with seven in ten visits under two hours, most visitors will never pay, and the charge lands on all-day parkers, who are often commuters rather than visitors. Operators bringing groups for longer visits should check where the free all-day spaces are before December.

Source: RNZ

Summer hiring has started earlier, but restaurants are still cautious on staff

Hospitality and tourism job ads on Seek rose 3.2 percent in September from August, and overall job applications grew at the fastest pace Seek has recorded since April 2024, RNZ reported. The Restaurant Association’s Nicola Waldren said summer hiring seemed to start a little earlier this year, but restaurants are still careful about staffing decisions. NZIER’s Shamubeel Eaqub expects hospitality hiring to be patchy because domestic spending is subdued.

For employers that is the better side of a soft market. Applicants are plentiful, with recruiter Hirestaff saying it gets hundreds of applications a day for entry-level roles and turns most away. The constraint this summer is not finding staff but deciding how many to carry when domestic demand is soft and international demand is growing. For seasonal visitor businesses, rostering is the lever, and the demand pattern differs between regions that lean on international visitors and those that lean on locals.

Source: RNZ

Coming up

That's today's briefing. The Shoulder Season is back every weekday morning.