Lousie Upston: Tourism Minister on the latest Stats NZ tourism figures

There’s confidence tourism spending will soar even more. 

Stats NZ data shows tourism spending hit $46.6 billion in the year to March 2025, up 3.3%. 

International visitors spent $18.1 billion – a 7% jump. 

Tourism Minister Louise Upston told Ryan Bridge Chinese arrivals remain below pre-Covid levels but have surged recently, driven by last year’s policy changes. 

She says one is allowing visitors with an Australian visa into New Zealand, which has had a significant impact. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Tourism well and truly back in business. Total spend has
hit forty six point six billion in the year of March.
That's up three point three percent. Now overseas visitors spend
this is your foreigners coming here and having fun, jump
seven percent to eighteen point one billion. Eleven percent of
the workforce is tourism employed in the sector, so that's good.
Louise Upston, Tourism Minister here to talk about the numbers. Louise,

(00:20):
good morning, Good morning Ran. That is good news and
particularly the foreign visitors and the Chinese are coming back.
They're still not recovered from COVID.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
Right, Yeah, So just the numbers that were released yesterday
relate to the period to March twenty five, so that
is you know, looking at historic data. But it's really
great to see strong recovery in international visitors because if
you think about what that means, more tourists means more
customers for Kiwi businesses. That's why we're seeing the jobs,

(00:52):
the number of Kiwis employed in tourism and hospitality increasing
as well. That's exactly what we want in terms of
growing the economy.

Speaker 1 (01:01):
In terms of the Chinese numbers. Have you seen in
the intervening period them coming back stronger.

Speaker 2 (01:07):
Definitely, So tourism businesses would say the Lunar New Year period,
which is just the last few weeks, has been particularly strong.
There were a number of changes that we made at
the end of last year around some visa settings that
have had a significant impact. One of them is that
if a Chinese person is in Australia and they have

(01:29):
an Australian visa, they can enter New Zealand visa free.
We think, and we're trialing that for twelve months. We
think that's had a really significant impact. So as we
see more data coming out, I'm very very positive that
we will achieve our target of getting our visitor numbers

(01:49):
back to what they were pre COVID.

Speaker 1 (01:52):
We're still I mean, tourism was number one in terms
of expert export earnings pre COVID. We haven't returned it
to its men tool yet. Do you think that'll come
soon or do you think there is just doing too good?

Speaker 2 (02:04):
Well, we're at number two at the moment, and we
do have an ambitious target to double the value of
tourism exports within the decade, and we've got a tourism
growth roadmap that basically maps out how we do that,
but it is important. Export growth is important because it
directly means an increase in jobs for New Zealanders. Key.

(02:28):
We businesses are growing and that means an increase in wages.
So that's why it is absolutely critical that we keep
our focus on growing tourism and I'm really really excited
to see that we're seeing results already.

Speaker 1 (02:42):
All Right, well, appreciate your time this morning. Louise upstin
the Tourism Minister. For more from earlier edition with Ryan Bridge,
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