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 early 2022, some governments, including New Zealand, relaxed these restrictions, allowing more people to cross their borders. From 1 August 2022, New Zealand’s border opened to all visitors and international students.
Since January 2020, governments have imposed international travel restrictions in multiple countries, due to the spread of COVID-19 around the world. In March 2020, the New Zealand government introduced further measures to protect New Zealanders from the COVID-19 virus, effectively limiting travel to New Zealand and travel within 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.
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 2022, this data was extracted:
Rows: 16-107
Columns: 2-1,189
Provided: 6,160 data points
Dataset originally released on:
February 16, 2023
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.