100 per cent pure carnage

Helen Soothill (26) from Leeds; Marcus McNevin (20) from Dublin and Kerry Drakes (23) from Hull. Photo / Janna Dixon

The English backpacker sits in Auckland's Globe Bar, a hedonistic hotspot for young tourists. He wears a shirt supporting Liverpool but is actually from Doncaster, South Yorkshire.

He sports a wrist brace after suffering a sprain last week when he tried swinging around one of the two poles installed in the bar for drunken, half-naked girls to writhe around.

"That pole attacked me," he says. "Attempting pole dancing while drinking is dangerous."

He arrived in New Zealand two months ago because it was one of the few countries offering a working holiday visas to 34-year-olds. Within three weeks of landing, after a splurge of takeaways and drinking, he was skint. He now works as a casual labourer and lives in a room in Auckland Central Backpackers that, conveniently, occupies the building above the bar.

He plans to travel further afield than Auckland once the weather gets warmer, but until then he's happy at the Globe – a late-night venue that Auckland police describe as a "trouble spot".

"Free food, cheap drinks: What more do you want?" asks the backpacker of his hangout.

This is Shawn Martland. He's the saviour of New Zealand tourism.

The tourism industry accounts for 10 per cent of our GDP and more than 20 per cent of our export earnings. But as the recession has taken grip globally, international travel – a consumer luxury – has dipped in almost all of New Zealand's key tourism markets.

The most recent data from Statistics NZ shows a 4 per cent decline in the number of people visiting New Zealand for a holiday over the last year, and more bad news is expected this summer.

Swine flu badly scared the Asian market, with arrivals plummeting from China (down 39 per cent), the Republic of Korea (down 37 per cent) and Japan (down 57 per cent).

The combination of global recession and global flu has created a perfect storm for a tourism. Malcolm Johns, chief executive of bus and tourism conglomerate InterCity, says the industry weathered the double-hit of the September 11 attacks and the outbreak of avian flu well. But, he says, the current storm is different: "This one is more perfect than any one we've faced before."

The sole bright spot in tourism has been backpackers. "The only thing that's saving our backsides at the moment is the youth market. They don't tend to have investments or mortgages, so their psychological state during these sorts of crises is a lot more stable," says Johns.

And whereas occupancy rates at New Zealand hotels has slumped to 41 percent, Steve Collier of the Youth Hostel Association says his two Auckland hostels have been humming. "We're tracking down, there's been a slight drop-off, but nothing dramatic," he says. His current occupancy rate is 65 to 70 per cent.

In Auckland's Fort St, an orange Stray Travel bus disgorges its backpacker cargo. The bus has just completed a day trip to Piha beach but, despite being the middle of winter in what is supposedly the tourist low season, there are very few empty seats.

Kerry Drakes, a 23-year-old from Hull in northeast England, is looking forward to a Friday night beer. An empty bottle is already tucked into the side of her backpack – although she is finding the local brew not served at a temperature she's used to.

Twenty-year-old Marcus McNevin, from Dublin, says he bought a one-way ticket to New Zealand because the country seemed off the beaten track. "I came here to get apart from the herd, to do something different. But when I got here there were 16 other people from Ireland at the hostel.'

Nonetheless, McNevin is fitting into the dominant backpacker culture. He'll be joining the rest of his fellow travellers from the bus in hitting Auckland's Friday night bar scene.

While official statistics on back-packer tourists are not kept – partly due to trouble in defining the term – Daniel Shields cites research saying that backpacker hostels accomodate as many tourists as the more up-market hotel sector.

A 2005 Ministry of Tourism study found that backpackers contributed $642 million to the economy each year – an economic stimulus that dwarfs our high-profile fashion industry.

Shields is chair of the New Zealand Backpackers Network, and he believes his industry has slipped under the radar. "It's a bit invisible and, dare I say it, if there's a journalist who's offered the chance of a free night in a dorm or a free night in the Huka Lodge – you know which way they're going to go."

He reckons the time is now right for backpacking to join the top table of tourism. He's helping to organise a Backpacker Conference to be held at the Auckland University of Technology later this month. Prime Minister John Key, as Minister of Tourism, is scheduled to speak.

This is a sign, hopes Shields, that serious attention will be paid to a budget industry long overlooked in favour of luxury rivals.

"To be honest our big tourism agencies have focused on the top end when they've been promoting the country," says Shields.

George Hickton, head of Tourism NZ, disagrees with this claim. His organisation runs multi-million-dollar tourism international advertising campaigns, such as 100% Pure, and he says their main objective is to get any tourist – up or down-market – through the arrivals gate. "The advertising focuses on the country, and they'll then choose how to travel the country and where to stay."

While Hickton's advertising campaigns play up New Zealand's natural attractions, potential visitors from the United Kingdom have long been more focused on drinking than bushwalks. Google searches in the UK for "New Zealand beer" outnumber those for "New Zealand nature" by two to one.

Hickton concedes that backpacking has been overlooked in the public consciousness. "They're not poor cousins, but they're in a sector where people make snap judgments – like that backpackers don't spend much."

Tourism NZ's research bears out the stereotype of the stingy backpacker – to a point. Backpackers spend, on average, $90 a day while in New Zealand. Other visitors spend nearly double that. But once length of stay is taken into account, the economic ledger is almost even.

On average, back-packers stay for a month while other tourists remain in the country for a little under three weeks. This means that, overall, the average total backpacker spend of $2777 nearly equals the average for other tourists of $2993.

"They stay longer, so it evens out," says Hickton. "They spend more money on activities, not accommodation."

Professor Simon Milne, of AUT's Tourism Research Institute, says that backpackers may skimp on hotels, but they make up economically by throwing money at other areas. "Although these backpackers may be living cheaply a lot of the time, they think nothing of spending a couple of hundred dollars on adventure tourism attractions."

That's all very well – but broken down hour by hour, day by day, New Zealand doesn't get much bang for its buck by investing in backpackers.

It is fair to say the backpacking industry doesn't have an entirely positive reputation. Globe Bar, where Shawn Martland and his fellow backpackers spend much of their time, was highlighted in 2007 by the Herald on Sunday for running heavy-drinking strip parties that saw women customers sucking on strap-on dildos after having "2$ whore" written on their naked backs with vivid markers.

Overseas, backpackers help prop up violent criminal cartels by being the principal custom for "cocaine bars" in Belize. In central and eastern Europe, an influx of low-rent tourists from Britain has led to bitter and angry words from figures of authority.

The rise of budget airlines in Britain has opened the floodgates to weekend visits to former Eastern bloc countries, and tour groups have sprung up specialising in obscene stag parties, including prostitution and urinating on national monuments.

The mayor of Latvia's capital, Riga, said last month that his country's tourist trade was blighted. "The only problem is that we have a large share of those British tourists. If we also had other tourists, then British visitors who piss about all the time would not be as noticeable. Let's not be political correct: unfortunately this is their specialty."

One New Zealand backpacking insider, who worked for six years in busy hostels in Auckland and Rotorua and prefers not to be named, says this sort of backpacker is not uncommon in New Zealand. In fact, she estimates more than half of backpackers she dealt with fit the ugly stereotype.

"The worst backpackers are always English. They wear those ridiculous sandals with the Velcro, and shorts so their pasty white legs show, and they're usually the ones carrying the bible," she says, referring to the ubiquitous Lonely Planet guidebooks.

This bible, she says, is followed so rigidly that many backpacking tourists never stray off the party bus route. "They don't ever get off the tour bus, and don't look outside the box that's written for them. They're kinda like lemmings, or sheep."

And cleaning up after backpackers can be nightmarish, she says. "There's a lot of vomit and piss, and there have been one or two time there has been shit in the room. And used condoms. And blood. They've fallen over while drunk, hit their head, bled a bit, and then checked out."

The problems with "beer-fuelled idiot" backpackers were particularly bad a couple of years ago, she says, when the Lions rugby team toured. That's an ominous sign with the Rugby World Cup just around the corner.

There's cash aplenty, but a cost to be paid, says the insider: "They do bring in a lot of money, but they also bring in a lot of ignorance."

And there appears to be a disconnect between clean, green messages like 100% Pure and the backpacker market. The dissonance was starkly illustrated in an article published last year in the Journal of Vacation Marketing. Hostels and visitors to New Zealand, the article found, pay only lip service to clean and green ideals.

Out of 25 hostels surveyed – all of which marketed themselves as eco friendly – only one had a written environmental policy and only two had facilities that lived up to their claims.

But visitors weren't complaining – at least not about environmental practices. As one hostel owner from Rotorua told the researcher: "Even if we stick to [green] rules, how do you make the tourists co-operate without turning the hostel into a boot camp? A lot of them these days really are spoilt brats; they waste water, they expect electric blankets and the internet; they really want five stars on a hostel budget. For a lot of them, it is not about being green, but about being cheap."

At the backpacker conference at AUT on September 17 and 18, discussion will try to steer away from stereotypes and instead focus on the diversification of backpackers, their use of social-networking technologies and how to best attract eco-tourists.

Professor Simon Milne says backpackers have changed con-siderably since the term was coined in 1990. "The backpacker market is much more than young people wandering our streets wearing bags. There's a whole emerging sector called 'flashpackers'."

Flashpackers, he says, are more mature travellers who backpacked in their youth and want to repeat the experience – but without the dodgy accommodation of the past. The $20m Nomads complex being built in Queenstown is aimed at this higher-spending niche.

Daniel Shields says the industry needs to be viewed as a seed industry rather than a seedy one. "Today's backpacker is tomorrow's family holidaymaker, and in a generation's time they return again as a grey gapper."

Ross Matthewman and Anne Purdoe – both staying at Auckland's YHA – are wrapping up a five-month trip through Australia and New Zealand. The Welsh couple, both 22, say the came to New Zealand for the scenery: "I've heard its very beautiful, and there's lots of adrenaline-related activity," says Purdoe.

Matthewman perks up at the mention of rugby, but this is one tourism seed that won't be germinating in time for the 2011 Rugby World Cup. Will he make the return trip for New Zealand's flagship tourism event? "Probably not. It's a long way to come."

Shawn Martland, here on his working visa, plans to see more of New Zealand this summer. He says he's heard good things about Queenstown and will likely take his work visa to the South Island town.

"Work is seasonal there," he says, "but it's a party season."