International tourism expenditure compared with selected New Zealand exports

Exports are valued fob (free on board – the value of goods at New Zealand ports before export) and include re-exports. Only a selection of major primary exports are shown in this 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.

Results for the year ended March 2023 are provisional.

Tourism expenditure includes spending by all travellers, whether they are international, resident householders, or business and government travellers. International tourism expenditure includes spending by foreign students studying in New Zealand for less than 12 months.

This dataset includes revisions made to both the domestic and international tourism expenditure series. These revisions cause changes to the value of tourism expenditure in the New Zealand economy, and affect the official tourism satellite account (TSA) time series.
Most notably, international visitor expenditure for the years ended March 2021 and 2022 was modelled due to the suspension of the IVS.

At URL provided, download 'Tourism satellite account: Year ended March 2023 – tables 1–18'.

The Tourism Satellite Account provides a picture of the role tourism plays in New Zealand, with information on the changing levels and impact of tourism activity. It presents information on tourism's contribution to the New Zealand economy in terms of expenditure and employment.
The data provider develops and publishes the tourism satellite account, using a United Nations World Tourism Organization framework, with funding from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment.
This is part of a core set of tourism data that provides base information for understanding and monitoring tourism activity in New Zealand. Other elements of the core dataset include a survey of spending by international visitors, regional tourism expenditure estimates, visitor arrival and accommodation statistics, and forecasts of international tourist numbers and expenditure.

Satellite accounts are an extension of the core national accounts, and involve rearranging existing information in the national accounts so that an area of particular economic or social importance can be analysed more closely.
A Tourism Satellite Account integrates data about the supply and use of tourism-related goods and services into a single format. It summarises the contribution tourism makes to production and employment, consistent and integrated with New Zealand's official national accounts. This ensures that the importance of the tourism sector is measured and understood in the context of the New Zealand economy as a whole. New Zealand's tourism satellite account (TSA) measures expenditure in New Zealand by both resident and non-resident tourists, and thus gives a picture of the overall size of the tourism industry, including its contribution to gross domestic product (GDP) and employment.

Stats NZ puts together tourism account figures on the basis of figures found on a number of other data collections including:
- Export education levy statistics (from the Ministry of Education)
- International Visitor Survey (from MBIE, paused)
- Domestic Travel Survey (MBIE, discontinued)
- Accommodation Survey (discontinued, replaced by Accommodation Data Programme from June 2020)
- Annual Enterprise Survey
- Household Tourism Expenditure Estimates (not publicly available)
- Linked Employer-Employee Data
- National Accounts
- Retail Trade Survey
- Cruise Ship Traveller Statistics
- Survey of English Language Providers (discontinued).