The way visitors plan, book, travel, engage, review and recommend is constantly evolving, and it is now crucial for New Zealand to consider how we will manage and co-ordinate our data infrastructure.
Although many international destinations are struggling to effectively manage the latest industry developments, countries that are proactively addressing these rapid changes are reaping significant rewards.
Destination Canada has arguably gone the furthest. Its Tourism Data Collective integrates hundreds of datasets, from Statistics Canada, card transaction companies and international travel intelligence, to compile a live national platform.
They have shifted tourism decision-making from retrospective reports to real-time insight. It is the clearest example in the world of what treating tourism data as critical national infrastructure looks like.
Scotland has embarked on a similar path. The Scottish Tourism Data Partnership is working to bring operators, agencies and researchers together into a shared data asset.
They are not there yet. Acquiring essential data is challenging, especially from competing businesses. Building the capacity to then translate these data into meaningful information that can drive decisions is arguably harder.
But the need is clear and vital: this work is critical to build the new foundations on which all destinations’ futures will depend.
The information architecture of tourism — how data flows, who holds it, what questions it can answer, how questions are answered — is the invisible hand that shapes what visitors see and do.
It determines which destinations, operators and narratives are seen, and which become invisible. As such, it determines how values, from financial to cultural, flow through the tourism system.
It determines who benefits, and who loses, which places and experiences are celebrated, whose stories are told, and whose are obscured or muted. This architecture is overwhelmingly controlled by global platforms.
AI raises these stakes further. AI outputs tend toward statistical averaging. AI will recommend what is already popular. It will flatten the distinctive into the generic. It often further homogenises visitors’ experiences.
That is the opposite of what destinations need, and the opposite of what visitors now want more than ever: meaningful travel experiences.
Creating ‘‘collective intelligence’’ for destinations means diverging from the status quo and our current global trajectory. It means building analytical systems that incorporate local human expertise alongside big data, and systems that weave in cultural knowledge, seasonal nuance and iwi and community perspectives on what kind of tourism works for a place.
It means ensuring the people who have a stake in the destination show up in the intelligence layer — not just the marketing layer.
New Zealand’s tourism system is composed of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses. Many are time-poor and under enormous, multi-faceted pressures. Expecting them to keep pace with exponential technological change without significant support is unrealistic.
Without co-ordinated intervention and support, this state of affairs will widen the gap between those who can access and use digital tools, and those who cannot. When that gap grows, it will profoundly reshape who succeeds and benefits from tourism, and who does not.
What New Zealand needs now is data infrastructure and collective intelligence to ensure tourism is shaped by the people who know this place best — not by algorithms optimised for someone else’s platform and profit margin.
A national tourism data system has become critical industry infrastructure. Creating this will require clear mandates; adequate resourcing; and strong, co-ordinated leadership across destinations, government, industry and academia to create a long-term vision, framework and delivery model. And this needs to happen now.
In New Zealand, this reaffirms the need for a national tourism development authority with a mandate to lead data infrastructure development, lift capability in relation to emerging technologies, and integrate the country’s tourism system — in a way that individual operators, agencies and regions cannot do alone.
Ultimately, this is not just about data or technology, it is about who controls the future of tourism in Aotearoa and whether that future reflects the people, places and values that define us. — Newsroom
• Susan Houge Mackenzie is an associate professor at the University of Otago who combines degrees in psychology and tourism with 10 years’ experience as a white-water river-boarding guide.
