Visitor record for January

By SIMON HENDERY

As the tourism industry basked in the free global publicity generated by New Zealand's Oscar success yesterday, it was also celebrating another record-setting month.

Short-term overseas visitor arrivals increased 11 per cent in January, the second month in a row of double-digit year-on-year growth.

Tourism New Zealand said the extra 23,500 visitors who arrived in the country during January contributed an additional $60 million of foreign exchange to the economy.

"The number of visitors from some of our highest-spending markets, the US and UK, are up quite substantially," said Tourism NZ chief executive George Hickton.

"Added to the large increase in Australians, this translates to a financial boon for New Zealand."

Numbers from most Asian markets also increased, although the most lucrative Asian market, Japan, continued to lag behind where it was a year ago. Japanese travellers have been slow to venture far from home since last year's Sars virus scare.

Total arrivals from all Asian markets were up 4.8 per cent on January last year.

"Hopefully it is a sign of a steadily increasing recovery from these important markets."

For the year to the end of January New Zealand had 2,130,000 short-term visitors, 3.3 per cent more than during the previous year.