Tourism and the economy

The Tourism Satellite Account (TSA) report presents information on tourism's contribution to the New Zealand economy in terms of expenditure and employment.

Latest Tourism Satellite Account — December 2023 Update

Stats NZ develops and publishes the Tourism Satellite Account (TSA) with funding we provide.

The 2023 TSA report provides a picture of the role tourism plays in New Zealand, with information on the changing levels and impact of tourism activity. Results cover provisional figures for the year ended March 2023, and detailed results for 2022.

Note: Tables 19-26 contain detailed tables for the year ended March 2022.

2023 Key Provisional Estimates

Note: The 2023 annual estimates featured capture the impact of COVID-19 in New Zealand through to March 2023 and are expressed in nominal terms.

Key provisional estimates for the year ended March 2023:

total tourism expenditure was $37.7 billion, an increase of 39.6% ($10.7 billion) from the previous year
international tourism expenditure increased 456.9% ($8.9 billion) to $10.8 billion:
- international student expenditure (studying less than 12 months) was $2.1 billion, an increase of 1068.2% ($2.0 billion)
- international tourism’s overall contribution to New Zealand’s total exports of goods and services was 11.4%, an increase of 9.0 percentage points
- GST generated from international tourists totalled $209 million, an increase of $72 million
overseas visitor arrivals to New Zealand increased 858.7% to 2,199,073
domestic tourism expenditure increased 7.2% ($1.8 billion) to $26.9 billion:
- household tourism expenditure decreased 2.8% ($576 million)
- business and government increased 26.5% ($1.2 billion)
tourism generated a direct contribution to GDP of $13.3 billion, or 3.7% of GDP, an increase of 30.9% ($3.1 billion)
the indirect value added of industries supporting tourism generated an additional $8.8 billion, or 2.5% of GDP
the number of people attributed to being directly employed in tourism was 189,432 – an increase of 48.0% (61,452 people)
- the number of tourism employees was 164,619 – an increase of 49.7% (54,663)
- the number of tourism working proprietors was 24,813 – a decrease of 37.6% (6,786)
- as a share of the total number of people employed in New Zealand, direct tourism employment was 6.7% .

Interpretation of data

The data sources used in deriving the numbers for the March 2022 and 2023 years at an industry, commodity, and resultant aggregate level will be subject to future updates. These updates reflect COVID-19 related methodological challenges and further assessment and interpretation of the expenditure compositional change as part of the 2023 cycle of annual analysis and updated input datasets. Data presented in this TSA for these years should serve to provide initial guidance but may be subject to larger than usual updates.
Accommodation expenditure in the March 2023 year continued to be impacted by both Managed Isolation and Quarantine (MIQ), and the use of traditional accommodation providers for emergency housing, including in response to the Auckland Anniversary floods and Cyclone Gabrielle. In line with the definition of a tourist, the vast majority of MIQ expenditure would not fully constitute tourism activity, particularly so for returning New Zealand residents, and emergency housing is not considered tourism activity. While this expenditure would be captured on the supply side, an allowance has been made to exclude this from the tourism demand side. This has consequently led to lower accommodation product and industry ratios which flow through to tourism employment derivations. These derived numbers therefore better reflect ‘employees’ engaged in tourism as opposed to those in accommodation industry entities servicing MIQ and emergency housing.
The derivation of tourism employment is reliant on the relationship between tourism expenditure as a proportion of an industry’s output multiplied by that industry’s employment counts. The substantial loss of international tourism expenditure, and some domestic tourism expenditure, together with COVID-19’s wider impact on industries’ output, and the tourism recovery to date has seen these historically relatively consistent industry ratios change significantly. Furthermore, employment counts in industries have also been affected, noting that during COVID-19 this included a number of people being determined as being employed who have been supported by wage subsidy payments.

The Sustainable Tourism Explorer (STE) has been updated with the new TSA data

TSA data are now available in the STE in the form of interactive graphs. As well as visualising the data, you can also customise the graphs and download them or the related data.

Tourism GDP as a proportion of total GDP(external link) — Tourism Evidence and Insights Centre (TEIC)

Direct tourism value added by industry(external link) — TEIC (not available for the provisional year-ended March 2023)

Direct and indirect employment from tourism(external link) — TEIC

2023 Revisions

Tourism satellite account: Year ended March 2023 includes updates made to both the domestic and international tourism expenditure series. These updates cause changes to the value of tourism expenditure in the New Zealand economy, and affect the official tourism satellite account (TSA) time series.

Updates to the expenditure series included the following.

Historic changes to export education source data used to derive international student expenditure.
Updated source data used in the derivation of imputed rental on holiday homes.
Methodological improvements and changes:
- integrating updated Annual Enterprise Survey (AES) data (2019 and 2020) and AES 2021 data with household tourism expenditure estimates (HTEE)
- continued modelling of the HTEE across the full year ended March 2023 due to changes in data supply arrangements (covered in detail in 'Appendix 2: Methodology' in download document)
- updated HTEE supplementary data sources
- national accounts data, including updated nominal GDP statistics from 2015 to 2021 (see 2023 preview of national accounts improvements).
Updates were also made to annual Linked Employer-Employee Data and Household Labour Force Survey sources used in determining tourism employment.

Tourism satellite account: Year ended March 2022 Appendix 2: Methodology(external link) — Stats NZ

2022 national accounts improvements preview(external link) — Stats NZ

Tourism industry ratios are impacted because of these updates. These ratios are the proportion of an industry’s output that is consumed by tourists and are used to calculate value-added and tourism employment estimates. As a result of the ratio changes, StatsNZ updated the historical value added-time series. Together with the ratio changes, StatsNZ also updated the tourism employment time series.

More data

More detailed Tourism Satellite Account data and technical information is available on Stats NZ's website.

Tourism statistics(external link) — Stats NZ

Previous Tourism Satellite Account tables

Note: Tables 19-26 contain detailed tables for the year ended March 2018.

2018 Tourism Satellite Account Tables

Tourism Satellite Account 2018: Excel Tables 1-18 [XLSX, 193 KB]

Tourism Satellite Account 2018: Excel Tables 19-26 [XLSX, 82 KB]

Note: Tables 19-26 contain detailed tables for the year ended March 2017.

2017 Tourism Satellite Account Tables

Tourism Satellite Account 2017: Excel Tables 1-18 [XLSX, 189 KB]

Tourism Satellite Account 2017: Excel Tables 19-26 [XLSX, 78 KB]

Note: Tables 19-26 contain detailed tables for the year ended March 2016.

2016 Tourism Satellite Account Tables

Tourism Satellite Account 2016: Excel Tables 1-16 [XLSX, 154 KB]

Tourism Satellite Account 2016: Excel Tables 19-26 [XLSX, 60 KB]

Note: Tables 19-26 contain detailed tables for the year ended March 2013.

2015 Tourism Satellite Account Tables

Tourism Satellite Account 2015: Excel Tables 1-14 [XLSX, 185 KB]

Tourism Satellite Account 2015: Excel Tables 17-24 [XLSX, 57 KB]

Note: Tables 17-24 contain detailed tables for the year ended March 2012.

2014 Tourism Satellite Account Tables

Tourism Satellite Account 2014: Excel Tables 1-14 [XLSX, 193 KB]

Tourism Satellite Account 2014: Excel Tables 17-24 [XLSX, 69 KB]

Note: Tables 17-24 contain detailed tables for the year ended March 2011.

Last updated: 01 March 2024

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