Tourism - from a three night stand to a long term relationship

Tourism measures its value by what tourists spend when they are on our shores. For many regions, this is a 2-3 night stand.  72 hours. Of course, minus sleeping, travelling and time spent doing DOC walks and other free activities.

But does this way of measuring the value of tourists do a disservice to our visitors and the industry that serves them?  We want them to fall in love with our country but when we only measure their value by what they spend here, are we missing other ways visitors add value to our country?

Even the backpackers who don’t fit the ‘value over volume’ version of tourism can add significant value.  If a frugal backpacker picks cherries for three weeks in the peak season their value to the New Zealand economy is worth far more than whatever they would have spent as a visitor.  At the moment we don’t count their contribution because it’s not ‘spend’.

Beyond visitors, tourists have a life beyond travelling – they make consumer choices when they get home, and for those that fall head over heels with our place, they may choose to commit their futures here – by moving here to learn, work or invest.

The value from visitors beyond their spend can be as simple as them favouring New Zealand wine over the South African equivalent at their home supermarket, studying their PhD here rather than in Canada, or relocating to take a robotics engineer role with an NZ technology company. Their relationship with New Zealand can be enduring, and flourish, without even being here.

Without visitors, our export products would find it tougher to get traction in overseas markets, our Universities would struggle to attract international students and businesses in need of specialist talent wouldn’t be able to compete with other opportunities.  And yet we don’t count this as value.

Part of the reason for this is that it is messy to measure.  A tourist today may encourage their child to study here in five years’ time, or they may migrate ten years after they first visited.  Measuring the value of this long term relationship value is complex.

Of course these visitors make choices about what sort of relationship they have with us now.  Some of them will be loyal consumers of our products or will add value in other ways – but these relationships are built more by accident than by design.  There are no incentives for the tourism industry to cross-sell beyond itself. Why would a boutique BnB promote skilled jobs or investment opportunities to visitors?

While it might seem irrelevant to be exploring this issue when international tourism isn’t possible, it is in fact the very time to be questioning how we measure value and whether we can deliberately foster a long term love affair.

Peter Harris is the Economic Development Manager at QLDC. The views and thoughts expressed in this article are his own and may not reflect the position, policies or decisions of QLDC.