“Tourism is a significant export earner for New Zealand, supporting sector and country recovery. Competition for visitors is fierce and New Zealand needs to work hard to encourage visitation.  We’re focussed on targeting a range of key visitor markets to support long term growth and ensure we’re resilient to any future global challenges.

To support this Tourism New Zealand recently hosted a trade roadshow across Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, and Bangkok. This platform provided travel trade professionals with a unique opportunity to learn about the latest offerings and insights into New Zealand's tourism experiences. 

The New Zealand delegation was made up of 37 companies, comprising airports, airlines as well as New Zealand accommodation, transport, and tourism experience providers who met with a total of 660 travel trade members.

Travellers from the Southeast Asia region have shown a keen interest in New Zealand, with around 50 million people actively considering a holiday here across the four countries. Holiday arrivals are also positive, with almost 94,000 total visitor arrivals from Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand this year to July 2023. 

“Visitors from Southeast Asia support Tourism New Zealand’s strategy to attract high quality visitors who contribute positively to our economy, environment, culture, and communities. Southeast Asian visitors prefer to visit during our off-peak seasons of autumn, winter, and spring helping to spread visitation across the year. 

“We’ve got a large pool of potential visitors to reach and convert demand into arrivals and we’re looking forward to working with travel trade to support this,” said Angela Blair.