The Shoulder Season A daily read on New Zealand tourism

Tuesday 3 November 2026

Mackenzie votes to charge $1.50 at 33 toilets, and hospitality failures level off while its defaults keep climbing

The Mackenzie district will put most of its public toilets behind an app by Waitangi weekend, Centrix finds hospitality liquidations flat for the first time in months but credit defaults up a fifth, Tourism New Zealand pitches the country to Americans as a wellness retreat, and Winston Peters floats an airport at Kaikohe that nobody else had heard of.

By the Shoulder Season desk

A lake fringed with trees beneath a snow-capped peak
Photo by Fabio on Unsplash

It’s Tuesday, the eve of Tourism Summit Aotearoa in Christchurch, and the user-pays argument has moved from the levy to the loo. Here’s what’s moving.

Mackenzie will charge $1.50 at 33 public toilets from Waitangi weekend

Mackenzie District councillors voted on Friday to put 33 public toilet facilities on user-pays by Waitangi weekend 2027, Local Democracy Reporting’s Claire Taylor reported via 1News. The first sites are the busiest on the State Highway 8 corridor: Fairlie, Burkes Pass, Tekapo Tavern, Tekapo Footbridge, Tekapo Lakeside, Pukaki and Twizel. Tekapo’s Hamilton Drive toilets already charge.

The system comes from Penny, a New Zealand-owned company. Users register and pay $1.50 an entry through an app, a website or a digital key, and Penny takes 20 percent of revenue plus a monthly site fee. Installing it costs $165,000, against annual running costs for the facilities of $1.07 million. The council’s consultant estimated revenue at $86,000 a year if half of users pay, rising to $667,000 if 95 percent do. Operations manager Neil Jorgensen said that at 50 percent, ratepayers would face no rates rise, and that a December report will recommend locals pay nothing, although councillors still have to settle who counts as local and how that is checked. Report author Samantha Strong of Thrive Spaces and Places put the case plainly: visitors and New Zealanders alike have “been getting nature-based and tourism infrastructure for free”.

The useful number is the gap between those two revenue estimates. The district already has a $2.5 million government grant for its toilets and is still putting $507,873 of its own money in, so whether a pay-to-enter model works depends almost entirely on compliance at a roadside stop where the alternative is a cafe, a farther toilet or the verge. That is the experiment every other high-traffic, low-ratepayer district will be watching before the 2027 summer.

Stat of the day

1.35m

Estimated visits to just seven Mackenzie toilet facilities in the ten months from September 2025 to June 2026. (Mackenzie District Council report, via Local Democracy Reporting)

Source: 1News / Local Democracy Reporting, 1News on the September proposal

Hospitality liquidations stop rising, but the sector’s credit is getting worse

Centrix’s October Credit Indicator counts 431 hospitality company liquidations in the 12 months to September, up 41 percent on a year earlier and one fewer than the 432 in last month’s report, which had itself risen from 422 the month before. The rolling total has, for now, stopped climbing. Hospitality still fails at 3.3 times the all-sector rate, with 1.4 percent of registered firms liquidated in a year. Across all industries, liquidations reached 3,173, up 18 percent, with construction the largest by number at 790.

The plateau is not the same as recovery. Hospitality’s credit defaults are up 21 percent year on year, more than three times the all-sector rise of 6 percent, and the average credit score on new hospitality applications is 725, the second lowest of the sectors Centrix breaks out. At the same time, hospitality credit demand is up 11 percent. More businesses asking for credit, with weaker scores and more of them falling behind, is the kind of pattern that can surface in liquidations later. Chief operating officer Monika Lacey said the pressure remains concentrated in consumer-facing industries.

Source: Centrix October Credit Indicator (PDF), NZ Herald

Tourism New Zealand sells the country to Americans as a wellness retreat

Tourism New Zealand has launched “Studio New Zealand”, a campaign selling natural and cultural wellness to the United States, the NZ Herald reported on Friday. It features Rotorua’s geothermal spas, Northland’s kauri forest, a cold plunge in Kaikōura, Nelson’s mountain lakes and the Waitākere Ranges, and US wellness influencer Liz Moody is being flown in for a seven-day “reset”. The agency estimates the campaign will add 7,100 arrivals and $47 million of visitor spending by June 2027. No budget was given.

The choice of market is easy to follow. Marketing general manager Brodie McLeish called the US “extremely vital”: it is New Zealand’s second-largest visitor market, worth $2.18 billion in the year to June, and at 105 percent of pre-Covid levels it is one of the few markets fully back. The angle is the more interesting part. Selling a glacial lake as the free version of an ice bath repositions things the country already has in abundance, rather than asking anyone to build a product. For operators, the test is whether they can describe what they already do in those terms; the campaign has done the hard part of naming the category. McLeish said the agency would consider taking it to other markets depending on results.

Source: NZ Herald

Winston Peters floats an airport at Kaikohe, and the aviation bodies are none the wiser

NZ First leader Winston Peters told a public meeting in Ōrewa at the weekend that a foreign country is interested in building an airport at Kaikohe, the NZ Herald reported. He said the conversation began seven years ago and is still live, but tied any progress to fixing the town’s law and order first, and did not name the country. The NZ Airports Association and the Aviation Industry Association both said they knew nothing of it. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said it was “not something that I’m well briefed on at all.”

Aviation analyst Simon Russell of Eagle Aviation Consulting, a former Air New Zealand executive, told the Herald the idea could work. A sealed runway of at least 1,400 to 1,500 metres would cost about $20 million, he estimated, and better air access could make Northland “the new Queenstown of the north”. He also said Kaitāia makes more sense as a northern gateway than Kaikohe.

Four days out from an election, this is a campaign idea, not a project: no funding, no named investor and no proponent beyond the speaker. The point underneath it is real enough. Northland’s visitor economy is held back more by the distance from Auckland than by anything it lacks on the ground, which is why air access keeps coming back as the fix.

Source: NZ Herald, NZ Herald

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