Regions get precious future snapshot

By SIMON HENDERY

New research predicting where in New Zealand overseas visitors will spend their money is expected to be released by the Government next week.

Results of the Tourism Research Council's project are due to be unveiled by Tourism Minister Mark Burton at a conference in Rotorua.

The project will provide the first region-by-region predictions of tourism spending and accommodation patterns, providing a valuable planning tool for the industry.

Statistics New Zealand this week released three years of tourism statistics - the Tourism Satellite Account 1998-2000 - which it said verified the growing importance of tourism to the economy.

The report showed that tourism expenditure was $13.2 billion in the year to March last year, an increase of $1.7 billion since 1997.

Direct and indirect spending on tourism now accounts for 9.7 per cent of GDP.

One in 10 workers is linked to tourism either directly or indirectly. There are more than 94,000 fulltime-equivalent jobs directly related to tourist activities and a further 69,000 estimated to be indirectly employed servicing the sector.

Tourism Research Council chair Sean Murray said the satellite account report - so named because it involved extrapolating tourism components from data relating to other industry sectors - would provide valuable planning information for tourism operators.

"For the first time we've got trackable data over a spread of a few years."

Mr Murray said the figures were also much more up to date than those previously available.

"We're working hard to get the industry to focus a little bit more on hard facts and figures in its planning and in its business development programmes rather than just continually operating on gut instinct."

He declined to comment on specifics of the research, to be released at the annual NZ Tourism Conference.

The conference would be a chance to push the message that growth in the industry was inevitable and needed to be planned for, he said.

Simon Milne, professor of tourism at the Auckland University of Technology, said satellite-based predictions broken down on a regional basis could be very useful to smaller tourism communities.

But Professor Milne cautioned the figures would provide only "good estimates" of future tourism trends.

"Whether they are going to be of much value to small businesses and communities I don't know yet."