Smaller towns and regions in the South struggling to deal with high tourism numbers might get some good news today.
Associate Minister of Tourism Paula Bennett said yesterday at the Trenz tourism conference in Rotorua Prime Minister John Key would be announcing details of infrastructure spending by the Government to help regions struggling with a flood of tourists.
The news came as the latest figures from the the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) showed rapid growth in the industry.
Visitor arrivals to New Zealand were expected to grow 5.4% a year and reach 4.5million visitors in 2022.
That would be an increase from 3.1million last year, when Otago struggled to cater for freedom campers, and ratepayers in popular areas such as
Queenstown struggled to foot the bill for required infrastructure.
Mrs Bennett said she could not give away too much about the infrastructure announcement but the Government had "specific sympathy'' for areas with low ratepayer bases and high volumes of tourists.
The figures, though, were "pretty exciting''.
"It's positive. It means more jobs.
"With that comes a few challenges, but they're the challenges of success.''
MBIE evidence, monitoring and governance general manager Michael Bird said the big story in the six-year forecast was the predicted growth of the Chinese market.
He said there was an increasing proportion of free and independent travellers from China, and they tended to stay much longer than visitors on group shopping tours.
Their travel patterns were changing, with Chinese visitors spreading further into the regions and spending more.
China was expected to become New Zealand's largest tourism market by amount spent in the next two years, and to surpass the $5billion mark by 2022.
At present, Australia was New Zealand's largest visitor market, providing more than 1.3million visitors in 2015.
That market would continue to be healthy and looked set to grow by 25% by 2022.
