It marks a step up in tourist travel with about 30,000 people currently arriving each week rather than numbers near that landing each day before the border closure. International students and people on working holidays will be able to come in.
It will mean a lot more family reunions and trips for leisure and a chance to shake off a bit more of the Covid gloom even if the country is not where it needs to be with the pandemic.
Ideally, the shift would have occurred with New Zealand's Omicron wave at a satisfyingly low level. Unfortunately, that isn't yet the case.
The country's seven-day rolling average of Covid cases continues to show drift and a slow glide downwards, rather than a quick drop. More positively, death and hospital rates have gradually been falling.
When combined with the switch from red to orange Covid settings, the situation could be vulnerable to a temporary reverse or potentially a second wave as the weather gets colder.
The 5656 confirmed community cases reported on Sunday May 1 were a lot better than the 13,475 on April 1 or the 19,456 on March 1. But last Saturday's total was 7043 and yesterday's was 6636.
The Omicron wave could be at least three months long before case numbers once again sink near 1000 - where they were in mid-February.
Modellers say that winter could be a danger period for another wave and that loosening restrictions could soon push up case numbers. Open borders make it more easier for new variants to get in.
People can be expected to spend more time indoors in the colder months, creating conditions for easier spread of the virus. Decreasing immunity and new variants have left populations overseas susceptible to reinfection.
Covid-19 modeller Professor Michael Plank said: "It could be that we see a bit of an effect in the change to orange and the relaxation of people's behaviour. But that's probably not likely to cause a massive increase in case numbers: it's more likely to be a bump."
He also said overseas visitors were entering a country where the virus had already been widely spreading.
University of Otago epidemiologist Professor Michael Baker has said border testing numbers suggested the rate of infection among arrivals was higher than in the community.
Plank said the number of reinfections "we're getting is going to be an increasingly important indicator. If we start to see a significant increase in these, then that would point to the possibility of a second wave being driven by waning immunity."
People still need to behave as though the virus is in the community - because it is.
Even so, the latest border move is largely a positive one within the new normality of a more manageable global pandemic.
