Domestic tourist visitor days

IBISWorld forecasts the total number of domestic tourist visitor days to increase 3.4% during 2025-26, to 65.80 million days. Through the first half of the year, domestic tourist visitor nights, a different but similar metric reported by the MBIE, are up 358,500 compared to the same time in 2024-25, driving growth expectations. This marks a reversal of the short run decline in domestic visitor days since hitting a post-pandemic peak in 2022-23. Growth in real household discretionary income, increasing mortgage affordability and improvement to the consumer sentiment index are some of the reasons that domestic travel has become more popular in 2025-26.

According to Statistics New Zealand, most domestic trips are undertaken for the purpose of a holiday, or to visit friends or relatives. Travelling for business purposes also accounts for a significant share of total domestic tourist visitor days. Other purposes for domestic travel include education and medical reasons. Auckland is the most popular region for domestic travel, accounting for close to one-fifth of all domestic tourist visitor days. Auckland is New Zealand's most populous city and is home to numerous attractions and sporting events, encouraging tourism to the region. Business tourists are also most likely to visit Auckland. Other popular regions for domestic tourists include Waikato, Canterbury, Northland and Wellington. However, domestic tourism is spread across the country, with the reasons for travel varying between different regions. For example, many tourists visit Queenstown in the Otago region for skiing and other adventure activities, while many visit the Hawke's Bay region for food and wine experiences.

Prior to the pandemic, growth had been relatively steady each year. However, domestic tourist visitor days declined over the first half of 2020-21, driven by a short-term national lockdown at the start of the year. According to the Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment (Hikina Whakatutuki), domestic spending on tourist accommodation in the three months ending June 2020 declined more than 60% compared with the same period in 2019. However, New Zealand's relatively swift containment of the spread of COVID-19 allowed domestic travel to continue relatively uninterrupted in the second half of 2020-21. As international travel remained restricted over this period, a large number of New Zealanders traded their international holidays for domestic travel experiences, minimising the decline in domestic tourist visitor days in 2020-21. Intermittent lockdowns in 2021-22, particularly in Auckland, also pushed down visitor days. However, domestic households used banked-up savings from the pandemic to spend on tourism in 2022-23, causing a large jump in domestic tourist visitor days during the year. Across 2023-24 and 2024-25, domestic travel has declined slightly, largely due to contractions in real household discretionary income and a return to the long-run underlying growth rate after abnormally high domestic travel in 2022-23. International travel has also been rising over the past two years, indicating that more New Zealanders are opting to prioritise overseas holidays over local experiences. Overall, IBISWorld forecasts the total number of domestic visitor days to increase by an annualised 1.8% over the five years through 2025-26.