The Shoulder Season A daily read on New Zealand tourism

Wednesday 4 November 2026

Summit day in Christchurch, three days out: five parties, five answers on a bed levy, and an industry that wants to hire

Tourism Summit Aotearoa opens at Te Pae with the parties still split five ways on how regions pay for visitors, TIA's workforce survey finds more than half of operators recruiting and most of the new jobs at entry level, tonight's awards come from a record field, and a Spark fault takes card payments down across Southland and Otago.

By the Shoulder Season desk

A modern hotel lobby with designer furniture and timber walls
Photo by Frames For Your Heart on Unsplash

It’s Wednesday, about 300 of the industry are in one room in Christchurch, and the election is on Saturday. A thin news day, so four items, kept deep. Here’s what’s moving.

The industry meets with the parties still split five ways on a bed levy

Around 300 tourism leaders gathered at Te Pae Christchurch this morning for Tourism Summit Aotearoa, run by Tourism Industry Aotearoa under the theme “Distinctive by Design”, RNZ reported. TIA chief executive Rebecca Ingram told RNZ the signals point to a strong summer, and that tourism has come up in the campaign “more prevalent this year than ever before”. The headline problem has not moved: regions say they cannot build the infrastructure visitors need without a sustainable way to pay for it.

On that question, RNZ’s round-up has five parties giving five different answers. The Greens would give councils the power to set up a bed levy. Labour leader Chris Hipkins said councils should be able to introduce one if they choose, leaving it to them. National has stepped back from the bed tax flagged in the Auckland city deal and instead pledged to share part of the International Visitor Conservation and Tourism Levy with councils. ACT proposes a “local tourism dividend” paying councils $1 per guest night, funded from existing levies and GST. NZ First backs levies like those in the Auckland and Queenstown city deals, provided they do not fall on New Zealanders.

Lined up side by side, the split is really about who decides and who pays. Two of the five would let councils charge visitors directly. Two would recycle money the Crown already collects. NZ First would allow a levy but only on international visitors, which would be the hardest of the five to administer at a hotel front desk. Whichever coalition forms after Saturday, an accommodation provider in a high-visitor district could plausibly face a new charge to collect, or none at all, depending on a negotiation nobody can call yet. Ingram’s request to every party was narrower: back the industry’s Tourism 2050 strategy and its ten actions, whoever governs.

Source: RNZ, TIA on the Summit theme

Stat of the day

100,000

Additional workers tourism would need to double its exports by 2034, or roughly 10,000 to 13,000 new entrants every year. (Tourism Industry Aotearoa workforce forecasts)

More than half of tourism operators are recruiting, and most of the jobs are entry level

TIA’s annual workforce survey, run by Angus & Associates with 231 businesses responding, has 86 percent of tourism organisations confident about the year ahead. Fifty-one percent are actively recruiting, up four points on 2025, and 78 percent expect to fill at least one new role in the next 12 months, which TIA says is up significantly on last year. Only 22 percent are worried about holding on to the staff they have.

The mix of vacancies has shifted. Entry-level roles now make up 55 percent of openings, up ten points on last year, with mid-level roles at 30 percent and senior roles at 15 percent. That is good news for anyone starting out and a training load for employers, who will be onboarding more people with no tourism experience just as the summer peak arrives. TIA points to Tourism becoming a Year 12 and 13 school subject as one long-run answer, and lists the things operators are already doing to compete for staff: flexible hours, the living wage, conferences and development, meals and sometimes accommodation.

The short-run answer is visas. A quarter of operators plan to hire Working Holiday Visa holders this summer, and Ingram noted that working holiday arrivals have been declining steadily. That gives the WHV caps and settings a direct line into whether this summer’s optimism can be staffed, and it is one of the few immigration questions the next government can move quickly.

Source: TIA media release, 28 October (PDF), RNZ

Tonight’s Tourism Awards come from a record field of 177 entries

The New Zealand Tourism Awards dinner follows the Summit at Te Pae tonight. TIA received a record 177 entries across 12 categories, up from last year’s previous record of 150, and said judges noticed more first-time entrants and better evidence behind the claims. The Supreme Tourism Award will be chosen from the ten business category winners, and the Sir Jack Newman Award for Outstanding Industry Leader is presented on the night as well.

The finalist list is spread widely: a Coromandel micro-business, Waikato’s Hamilton Gardens, a Whanganui tour operator and several Queenstown names, with RealNZ a finalist in three business categories and seven others in two each. A rise in entries in a year when hospitality liquidations are up 41 percent says something about which part of the visitor economy is feeling confident.

Source: TIA finalists release (PDF)

A Spark fault took card payments down across Invercargill and Dunedin on Monday

Eftpos terminals connected through Spark lost their link to the Paymark network on Monday, RNZ reported, leaving businesses in Invercargill and Dunedin able to take only cash or bank transfers. Invercargill City Council took cash only at its main office and facilities, and FreshChoice said about 12 of its South Island stores could not complete some contactless payments. Paymark put in a fix on Monday morning, but reports kept coming in until a further fix that afternoon. Spark said some Eftpos connections had been wrongly routed inside its network, apologised, and said service was fully restored. Terminals on Eftpos New Zealand’s network were not affected.

Nobody has said how long the outage ran. The useful detail for operators is the chain: a terminal depends on its payment network and on the telco carrying it, and a fault in either one stops the till. A cafe or visitor attraction that knows which provider and telco its terminals use, keeps a cash float and has a manual fallback will lose less on a day like Monday. In January, at peak, that day would cost a great deal more.

Source: RNZ, NZ Herald

Coming up

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