Free flights and they will come

Ticket to ride: should the Govt pay for free flights so well heeled tourists will come here?

How about the Government giving a free return economy flight to any person visiting New Zealand from any Air NZ flight departure point in the world, on the condition that they buy a $10,000 Visa Debit card and spend it here?

It's one of the ideas being presented to next week's Entrepreneurs Summit, and reportedly comes from the same Remuera real estate agent who put the idea of building a national cycleway into Prime Minister John Key's head.

The argument goes that subsidising flights would double the number of tourists visiting our shores and generate huge publicity.

Shane Vuletich of economic consultancy Covec said the idea warranted further analysis.

He said work his firm had done indicated that for every dollar spent by a tourist in New Zealand, 25c of income was generated for the Government.

On that basis the $10,000 would generate $2500 and cover the cost of the subsidy.

"It's not at all dissimilar to what pretty much every other industry's doing at the moment, which is providing a subsidy or discounting certain parts of their services to sell other parts."

However, you would have to make sure you didn't capture visitors who were going to come here anyway and spend $10,000, he said.

Another commentator said the idea was dubious. "Would we be able to cope with the massive number of people that would respond to this kind of thing?"