Mining tourists

Of all the prejudices the quarry and mining industries have faced in recent times, we can now add the accusation that it could be bad for tourism.   BY ALAN TITCHALL.

The mere suggestion of opening up more marginal public land to access our mineral wealth sent a loud gasp from certain sectors that said, ‘Oh dear, what will our visitors think?’

Having been an aviation and tourism writer for some considerable time, which included editing an industry travel and tourism magazine for 10 years, I think I’m qualified to answer that.

The country is getting close to hosting 2.5 million visitors a year. For the year ending July 2009, we were inundated with 2,411,856 international visitors, down a little (2.8 percent) on the previous year. Although we like to refer to them all as ‘tourists’, less than a half of these visitors are strictly on holiday – the majority of them are here for the purposes of business, education and (a big chunk) visiting friends and relations  (VFR).

A whopping 40 percent of all our total visitors each year make a short hop across the Tasman from Australia, the mining capital of the world, and proud of it. New Zealand is also Australia’s biggest source market – with just over a million of us enjoying the sunburnt country every year without so much as a whimper of concern over Australian mining practices.

As competitive air capacity increases between here and Australia we are seeing more of our Tasman cousins. Since 1999 total Aussie visitor arrivals increased by 86 percent – all these figures are available online from Statistics New Zealand or the Ministry of Tourism.

Australia, as our biggest source market, is followed by the UK, the USA, China and Japan. In 2008 the United Kingdom provided over 285,000 visitors with half of them on holiday and a significant number drawn here by friends and relatives – over 40 percent VFR. Following 20 successive years of growth, the UK has already declined by seven percent since 2005 when arrivals from the UK peaked at 307,000, and I don’t think we can blame mining.

In 2008 the USA provided over 212,000 visitors, which was a drop from a peak of nearly 226,000 in 2006 following good growth after September 11, 2001. A six percent decline over the last two years reflects how vulnerable international tourism is to economic downturns.

Last year China provided five percent of our overseas arrivals after a short-term decline following a major earthquake and the Olympic Games. While the number of Chinese visitors to New Zealand has increased by around 70 percent since 2003, the number visiting South Island destinations ­– considered to be the best of the two islands for ‘eco tourism ‘value – has decreased, and it has nothing to do with mining on the West Coast. Itineraries for the vast majority of Chinese visitors are tightly controlled by tour companies based in China, with group or packages making up over 70 percent of the overall market and almost 90 percent of the holiday market. For this reason the most visited areas are those within a short distance of Auckland Airport, particularly tourist attractions around Rotorua and the Waikato – reflecting the very limited time frame most tour itineraries allocate for our country and a demand for ‘urban’ attractions rather than ‘scenic’.

In 2008 Japan provided four percent of our overseas arrivals for the year, declining by over 40 percent since the market peaked at 173,500 in 2002. The Japanese market, extremely safety conscious, would have been affected by the potential SARS epidemic and bird flu health scares in 2003 and 2005, and (I believe) reports of violence against tourists travelling through New Zealand.

So there you have it. While visitor numbers enjoy a small but steady growth, different markets come and go through a multitude of factors that include cost (currency value against our dollar), getting here (airline schedules and frequencies), safety, and the travelling fashions of each generation. But we can always rely on the Aussies.

I spent many years listening to tourism marketing authorities drumming our ‘100% pure’ clean green tourism campaigns that kicked in during the last decade of the last century, but after travelling other markets quite extensively, I’m not that convinced it is such a powerful bait – more self-image. There are cleaner and even greener destinations around the world, and better attitudes to such environmental concerns as vehicle emissions and fleet age (50 percent of our vehicles are over 12 years old). If the number of tourists who perish in the pursuit of tourism and recorded in our daily papers is anything to go by, I suggest there are also safer destinations.

So why do we attract tourists? Word of mouth is the best marketing we have, and we enjoy an attractive reputation for being a chummy lot, with an interesting and terribly boozy party loving ‘culcha’, who reside in the bottom of the world in a small country, with lots of space, where the scenery is very diverse and the distances between attractions very short. Just don’t expect fast service. Having a relatively ‘relaxed’ attitude to regulations and public liability (‘no blame’ ACC covers every visitor anyway) also makes for some interesting adventure tourism.

There is not the space here to go into comparisons between income from mining and tourism, suffice to say employees in the mining industry are far better paid and the price of minerals is a lot more stable that tourism – which has to be counted, not on sheer visitor numbers, but on length of stay and expenditure, which wax and wane.

Meantime, I will leave those who think our ‘politically correct green image’ is the country’s best tourism bait with this thought:

Worldwide, the top tourism destination over the past century, by a substantial margin of visitors, is France - particularly Paris.

While this destination is clean and green, and full of interesting cultural stuff, the French are famous for not giving a damn about what other nations think or being politically correct, or going out of their way to speak any language other than their own. Parisian service is infamously brusque, if not rude, the city’s energy is 80 percent nuclear sourced, and its swooning visitors don’t seem to be concerned about the country’s mineral mining practices or its greenhouse gas emissions. Go figure.