New Zealand tourism recovery lag revealed in international study

Tourists have returned faster to some countries than others with some already reaching 95 per cent pre-pandemic levels. Photo / Getty Images

New Zealand has landed in the bottom twelve countries making the slowest recovery in tourist numbers.

The study into the annual international arrivals of 75 countries aimed to show which travel destinations were returning to their 2019 pre-covid levels of tourism the quickest.


Partially compiled by financial services comparison site money.co.uk, the report found that while some countries had recovered quicker than others, all destinations had lost out on visitor numbers.

Bahrain is the comeback kingdom according to the survey, recovering almost 95 per cent of pre pandemic visitor numbers. However, these new visitors are on a budget.

"2021 tourism revenue of 1.8 billion is only 49% of what the island country accumulated in 2019 (US$3.7 billion), meaning travellers are spending less when they visit," says the report.

Countries in Europe - which benefited from a lot of neighbouring tourism markets, were quicker to remove travel restrictions or didn't have a considerable tourism industry to begin with - saw a quick recovery by the beginning of 2021. Second and seventh fastest to recover - Albania and Luxembourg quickly regained 70-90 per cent of their 2019 visitor numbers by 2021 and retained around 50-45 per cent of their international arrivals even during 2020.

Long-haul destinations in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean saw a drastic drop off in visitor numbers following the outbreak of the pandemic. The Dominican Republic, Maldives and Aruba lost almost two thirds of their visitor numbers in 2020, however quick reopening and aggressive marketing saw them rebound to almost 80 per cent of pre-pandemic visitor numbers in 2021 - as the 3rd, 4th and 5th fastest recovering destinations, respectively.

The Maldives reopened its borders to leisure travellers from July 2020, providing visitors were taken to resorts on uninhabited islands. In spite of the early opening of borders, the Maldives were able to manage the pandemic recording 180 thousand cases of Covid-19, with the majority of these seen during spikes at the beginning of 2022.

Isolation destination: The Maldives opened resorts on 'isolated' islands for leisure travellers in July 2020. Photo / Ishan, Unsplash

According to the Dominican Republic's Ministry of Tourism, the country attracted 700 thousand more tourists in December 2021 than over the Christmas period of 2019.

However not all countries visitors have flown in for summer. The largest France, Spain and Italy which saw between 65 and 90 million visitors a year, have struggled to recoup these huge numbers. All are still below 50 per cent of pre pandemic numbers. Much of this is a loss of long-haul travel from destinations where travel was still disrupted or strict travel restrictions were still in place.

However nowhere were the travel restrictions more acutely felt than in the countries enforcing them. Hong Kong, Japan and Australia were all in the bottom ten destinations, with 2021 international visitors representing less than 2 per cent of pre-pandemic arrivals.

Australia - which posted the 6th slowest recovery - only lifted its ban on international travel from November 2021 and opened its borders for foreign visitors in February 2022.
Similarly, Japan - the second slowest - has only just opened to foreign tourists this month.

Hong Kong saw less than half a per cent (0.4%) of its pre-covid visitors. The struggling travel hub's strict covid-zero policies and quarantine measures mean that the travel hub has seen only a fraction of the normal 24 million travellers who fly through Hong Kong. Revenue from international tourism has dropped to six per cent of pre-pandemic levels.

New Zealand however has fared slightly better. As the twelfth slowest tourism reboot, with visitors in 2021 only a fifth of pre pandemic levels.

In spite of this, visitors spent more per head than pre-pandemic according to Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment. MBIE gives the value of international tourism in 2021 as $26.1 billion, 60 per cent of pre-pandemic levels. However direct tourism spend took a dive, at $8.5 billion less than half its 2019 value.