New Zealand-resident travellers: People who live in New Zealand and are travelling overseas for less than 12 months.
Country of main destination: The country where a New Zealand-resident traveller will spend the most time while overseas. Departure cards do not ask travellers which other countries they intend to visit on the same trip.
Data calculation/treatment
From March 2020 to July 2022, the New Zealand government implemented measures to protect New Zealanders from the COVID-19 virus, effectively limiting travel to and from New Zealand.
Country of main destination (main country visited) comes from sampled data, and the sum of individual figures for countries may differ from totals derived from complete data.
Note: the 2023 data for countries with small samples is subject to high level of misclassification error and should be disregarded.
Changes to data collection/processing
Before November 2018, the travel purpose of New Zealand-resident travellers was based on departure card responses and linked to the correspondent arrival card via the passport number.
From November 2018, they are based on arrival card responses. This results in different patterns in purpose of travel. The two series should not be compared.
At URL provided select: Tourism > International Travel and Migration - ITM > NZ-resident traveller arrivals by main destination and NZ area (Monthly).
Select 'Rolling Annual' under the Travel Period tab. All other variables were selected to create this dataset.
From the dataset International Travel: NZ-resident traveller arrivals by main destination and NZ area (Monthly) December 2025, this data was extracted:
Rows: 16-143
Columns: 2-2,377
Provided: 2,299 data points
Dataset originally released on:
February 13, 2026
About this dataset
International travel covers the number and characteristics of New Zealand resident travellers (short-term movements) entering New Zealand.
Purpose of collection
To track travel movements of New Zealand residents.
Method of collection/Data provider
Data is obtained from electronic passport and flight records by the New Zealand Customs Service. New Zealand area comes from administrative data from the Integrated Data Infrastructure.