Chefs are in hot demand. “Chefs, chefs, chefs! Virtually impossible to find anyone,” lamented one Auckland restaurant owner recently. Australia is seeing a similar gap, with chefs ranked the eighth most in-demand occupation. Given this culinary skills shortage, we might expect such sought-after employees to be highly valued.

Apparently not. Our new report on chef wellbeing and working conditions shows chefs in Australia and New Zealand experience significant financial hardship and mental health issues, with many wishing to leave their jobs.

This has major implications for tourism, too, as jobs such as cheffing are “keystone occupations” in major destinations. When jobs can’t be filled, these places lose money.

Tourism revenue is booming, with visitors reportedly seeking more scenery, history and culture. The food chefs prepare in cafés and restaurants forms an integral part of the tourist experience. But despite the laws of supply and demand, the situation for chefs is unlikely to improve without radical changes to work practices.

Our study is the first quantitative survey to examine working conditions and mental health issues among chefs in both Australia and New Zealand. The survey was distributed through professional culinary associations, and final responses were captured as Australasia emerged from Covid restrictions.

The survey also followed up previous Australian studies, which indicated exploitation was an industry norm, with chefs experiencing burnout and wage theft.

‘Banter, bollockings and beatings’

The kitchen environment is well documented to be particularly harsh. As one British study titled “Banter, bollockings and beatings” made clear, an often macho culture can prevail, including bizarre induction rituals.

An Australian study published in 2022 showed chefs were significantly more likely than the general population to commit suicide. And even before the pandemic, the industry’s “toxic” workplace culture was blamed for mental health issues and high suicide rates among employees.

Most of our chef respondents were men, with an average age of 37. They had been chefs for 16 years on average. Of these, 42% originally came from outside Australia and New Zealand, underlining the profession’s high mobility.

The results reveal disturbing insights into chefs’ working conditions. It was surprising to find nearly half (44%) of our sample were in precarious employment, given the skills shortage.

Two-thirds (67%) of respondents worked more than 38 hours weekly, but a fifth of the chefs worked 52-61 hours. Of these, 6.33% worked 62 hours or more – well above New Zealand’s still commonplace 40-hour work week, and Australia’s legally prescribed 38 hours. Despite the fast-paced environment, a quarter did not get their legally entitled breaks.

Economic insecurity was very evident. Financial hardship was reported by almost one in five chefs (15-20%), and a quarter of respondents went without meals due to financial pressure. That those who feed others struggle to feed themselves seems a dark irony.

Two-thirds also reported working when sick, an average of nine days each a year. Post-Covid, this should concern health professionals, policymakers and the broader community.

Leaving the industry

The 2023 Umbrella Wellbeing report, which recorded New Zealanders’ perceptions of their workplaces and wellbeing, warns that long working hours and poor workplace cultures have adverse health outcomes, with New Zealand faring worse than Australia.

Nearly one in ten of the chefs surveyed suffered mental distress. Results showed high levels of physical and mental fatigue (“exhausted at work”, “emotionally drained”, “becoming disconnected”).

Respondents reported disrupted sleep and unhealthy lifestyles. Almost 15% of the sample consumed alcohol five or more days weekly, with 11.4% saying they had consumed hard drugs (LSD, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine or ecstasy) in the past year.

One in five hospitality professionals experiences depression according to charity The Burnt Chef Project. In a spoken-word performance for the project, poet and writer Joe Bellman describes “defeated faces and lifeless eyes” behind the kitchen door, where “breaking the human spirit is just company policy”.

The majority of respondents said they were likely (with 20% extremely likely) to look for a new employer during the next year. Many of these new jobs will be outside hospitality (which is classified within the overall tourism sector).

Another report commissioned last year by the New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) found a third of hospitality and tourism workers had high intentions of completely quitting the industries. Reasons included low pay and conditions, stress and toxic work environments.

Mental health and healthy hospo

Maybe not surprisingly, our survey showed intention to quit a job declines with better management support. Failure to improve working conditions for chefs, however, will have lasting consequences for the industry.

The Better Work Action Plan, the first phase of New Zealand’s Tourism Industry Transformation Plan, was launched by MBIE in 2023 under the previous government. It followed extensive consultation with representatives from hospitality and tourism, Māori, unions, workers and government.

Its aim was to develop a sustainable tourism workforce by addressing longstanding issues of low pay and poor conditions across the sector.

The first step involved hospitality and tourism workers receiving government approval to negotiate an industry-wide fair pay agreement. However, the current coalition government immediately scrapped fair pay legislation.

The Australian government’s post-Covid tourism recovery strategy, THRIVE 2030, has committed to “promote employment standards” regarding compliance obligations and fair work. If effective, these would address the breaches evident in our study.

The hospitality industry relies on young people actively choosing a culinary career. But MBIE forecasts show students are less likely to seek hospitality jobs given these problems in the sector.

By chance, however, New Zealand’s new minister for mental health, Matt Doocey, is also tourism and hospitality minister. It is now up to him to make the connection between his portfolios, and work to reduce the heat in the nation’s commercial kitchens.

Shelagh K. Mooney is associate professor at the School of Hospitality & Tourism, Faculty of Culture and Society with Auckland University of Technology, Matthew Brenner is a lecturer at The Hotel School Australia at Southern Cross University, and Richard Robinson is professor of Service Work & Employment at Northumbria University in Newcastle.

The authors acknowledge the assistance of the AUT Hospitable Futures Research Fund.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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As the austral summer draws to a close, we are preparing to fly over the Southern Alps to survey glaciers. This annual flight supports the longest scientific study of Aotearoa New Zealand’s icescapes – and it shows that all of our glaciers have retreated since 1978.

This year’s survey comes on the heels of the warmest year on record globally and the second warmest for New Zealand, which produced extreme weather events and impacts that still cut deep for many local communities.

Despite strong El Niño conditions in the Pacific this season, which typically boost ice volume, we expect the recent heat grilling the glaciers will have had a grim effect.

The 46-year record of end-of-summer glacier images is incredibly valuable because it contains irrefutable visual evidence of climate change. We can see how glaciers are changing from year to year, with extremely hot years such as 2023 standing out clearly.

But our insights aren’t limited to images of glaciers taken from light aircraft. We can also learn from historic paintings of New Zealand’s mountain landscapes.

Portraits of past climate

Old paintings with glaciers are common for the European Alps, where many artists lived and visited. But similar offerings are relatively rare for our part of the world.

What’s remarkable for New Zealand is that some of these works of art were produced without the artist ever seeing the glaciers.

We recently scrutinised the artistic vistas painted by John Gully to see if they were true to the real landscapes. Gully based his works on field sketches by Julius Haast, one of the first scientists to formerly recognise widespread glaciation in New Zealand.

Gully’s paintings show features that can be linked to glacial landforms we can see today, including moraines (rocks deposited by a glacier, typically at its edges), outwash fans (sediment deposited by braided rivers fed by a melting glacier) and trimlines (lines that mark a glacier’s earlier, higher position in a valley).

Many of those features in the paintings have ice in direct contact with them, showing how accurately field scientists and artists depicted glaciers at the time.

Gully’s paintings were intended to convey the dramatic scale of a mysterious land located far away from industrialised 19th-century society. Serendipitously, for contemporary scientists, comparing these artworks with current photos vividly shows the magnitude of ice loss that has occurred since the mid-1800s.

The perspective we get from Gully’s paintings concurs with studies that place the timing of ice retreat as being already underway in the mid-1800s. Prior to this time, known commonly as the Little Ice Age, New Zealand experienced cooler temperatures between about 1450 and 1850.

Modelling ice volume loss using these Little Ice Age landforms provides a benchmark. It illustrates that recent changes have occurred in a geological instant and that the peak summer flows from glaciers that helped create the braided river systems so typical of the South Island landscape are in the past.

Accelerating pace of glacier retreat

Recent glacier changes are occurring ever more quickly. The long-term photographic record from the Southern Alps shows an acceleration of the pace at which snowlines rise due to climate warming.

For a glacier to exist, average summer temperatures must be cool enough for the summer snowline to remain below mountain tops so ice can accumulate. We now observe that ice is disappearing from mountains which held small amounts during the late 1970s. Glaciers there are going extinct.

Combining long-term snowline observations with direct field measurements of glacier mass balance and 3D models of ice volume change gives a good synopsis of how things have changed and a sense of things to come.

We estimate at least 13 trillion litres of water (in the form of ice) has been lost from the Southern Alps since 1978. This is equivalent to the basic water needs for all New Zealanders during that time.

The regions around the central Southern Alps that hold many small glaciers are experiencing accelerated ice loss. Some areas, like Southland and Otago, have small glaciers that are rapidly approaching an extinction horizon. And once they pass it, we are not likely to see them again.

The central North Island also hosts a number of small glaciers on Mt. Ruapehu that feed into the headwaters of the Waikato and Whanganui rivers. Glaciers there were originally mapped in the mid-20th century, and again in 1978, 1988 and 2016. A recent photographic capture of Mt Ruapehu reflects a dire situation, indicating glaciers are fast approaching extinction.

Environments and ethics

New Zealand’s diminishing glaciers and loss of ice across Earth are largely carrying on unabated. These changes are primarily caused by rising temperatures driven by human activities that produce greenhouse gas emissions.

The global increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide continues undiminished. This needs to change soon and rapidly to protect many of our glaciers.

We face particularly serious ethical questions with respect to Mt Ruapehu’s glaciers. They help sustain the Whanganui River Te Awa Tupua, which has been granted the rights of a living entity. The glaciers’ ongoing retreat – and possible extinction – highlights our collective responsibilities for doing simultaneous harm to the environment and people.

The authors acknowledge Rebekah Parsons-King at NIWA for her work on the Glacier Extinction Horizons video. We also thank Brian Anderson for his long-term leadership on the Brewster Glacier snowstakes programme, and Pascal Sirguey for his work calculating mass balance for Brewster Glacier.

Andrew Lorrey is principal scientist and programme leader of Southern Hemisphere climates and environments at the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research; George Hook is a research associate (in process) at Canterbury Museum; Lauren Vargo is a research fellow at the ANtarctic Research Centre at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington; and Shaun Eaves is senior lecturer in physical geography, also at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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With Covid-19 travel restrictions largely a thing of the past for Australian and New Zealand tourists, Pacific destinations are enjoying the return of visitors – albeit at a slower pace than in other parts of the world.

Tourism in Fiji, Samoa, Vanuatu and the Cook Islands was hit hard by the pandemic, but patience and resilience are starting to pay off. Foreign dollars are once again circulating in those small economies. Recently, Kiribati welcomed its first international cruise ship since 2020.

But this isn’t a simple case of returning to normal. The past three years have allowed time for reflection, leading to a rising awareness of possible alternatives to pre-pandemic tourism models.

From senior levels within governments to grassroots tourism operators and citizens, there has been serious discussion about the resumption of business as usual, including several regional symposiums hosted by the South Pacific Tourism Organisation.

Issues of sovereignty and future resilience have been very much to the fore – quite untypical in a global tourism industry largely focused on boosting numbers as soon as possible. Questions remain, however, about the gap between rhetoric and reality.

Flipping the narrative

The Pacific Sustainable Tourism Leaders Summit in November 2022 brought together tourism ministers and industry stakeholders to discuss the future of regional tourism. This led to a regional commitment signed by 11 countries focused on promoting sustainable tourism.

Essentially, the aim is to flip the narrative: rather than Pacific nations being seen as dependent on tourism, regional tourism itself depends on the Pacific and its people surviving and thriving. Accordingly, Pacific countries are calling for fairer and more meaningful relationships with tourism partners.

Cook Islands’ associate minister of foreign affairs and immigration, Tingika Elikana, urged other Pacific leaders at the summit to rebuild tourism in a way that was equitable and inclusive:

“[It] is crucial that lessons are learned from recent crises and that steps are taken to embed long-term inclusivity, sustainability, and resilience into our tourism offering as it faces evolving challenges and risks.”

Vanuatu has been heading in this direction since early in the pandemic, when it made “destination wellbeing” central to its tourism recovery. The aim of “moving beyond solely measuring visitor arrivals and contribution to GDP” then fed into the country’s Sustainable Tourism Strategy, launched at the height of the pandemic.

Push-back on resorts and cruise ships

This reappraisal of scale and priorities has perhaps been most evident in Fiji where there has been strong opposition to a US$300m mega-project proposed by Chinese developers.

The hotel, apartment and marina complex would be built in an area containing one of the last remaining remnants of mangrove forest near the capital, Suva. Conservationists and local residents have been critical of the environmental and infrastructural impact of the proposed development, as well as the authenticity of its design.

There is now doubt about whether the government will renew the developer’s lease, due to expire in June. The minister for lands and mineral resources has said “there’s been a lack of transparency” from the developers, and that he “will continue to monitor the remaining conditions of the development lease”.

A leading opponent of the project, Reverend James Bhagwan, told Radio New Zealand:

“We’re not anti-development, but what we’re saying is we need to look at development from a perspective that places the environment at the centre, not at the periphery.”

There is a precedent here: approval for a multi-million-dollar resort and casino development on Malolo island was revoked in 2019 after another Chinese developer, Freesoul Investments, destroyed part of a reef, dumped waste and disrupted traditional fisheries. In 2022, the High Court fined the company FJD$1m. It was the first time a developer had been punished for an “environmental crime”.

Environmental concerns are also causing other Pacific countries to resist a return to mass tourism. In Rarotonga, Cook Islands, annual visitor numbers before the pandemic were ten times the island’s local population. The ability to cope with that level of tourism has since been seriously questioned.

And in French Polynesia, the government has banned port calls for cruise ships with a capacity greater than 3,500 passengers. The decision was based on concerns about air pollution, stress on the marine environment and social impacts. Daily cruise arrivals to Bora Bora are now restricted to 1,200 passengers, much to the relief of locals.

A new kind of tourism?

In the face of uncertainties due to climate change and geopolitical tensions in the region, it’s encouraging to hear local voices being heard in debates about the future of Pacific tourism – and political leaders appearing to respond.

The Pacific Island Forum leaders’ retreat in Fiji late last month discussed the tourism industry. The forum’s signature Blue Pacific Strategy for regional co-operation recognises tourism is an important component of national development, and the need to balance economic pressures with environmental and cultural protection.

But despite the apparent political will and regional focus on building resilience, tourism development will undoubtedly continue to challenge the desires and initiatives of Pacific peoples seeking more sustainable futures.

While the policy rhetoric sounds good, it remains to be seen whether Pacific governments will remain steadfast and united under mounting pressures from major cruise operators, Chinese commercial interests and large hotels looking to maximise occupancy rates.

Many Pacific people reported the natural environment – along with social, spiritual, physical and mental wellbeing – improved during the pandemic pause in tourism. But the reality of putting local wellbeing ahead of profits and increased tax revenue is yet to be fully tested as tourism bounces back.

Apisalome Movono is a senior lecturer in development studies at Massey University and Regina Scheyvens is a professor of development studies, also at Massey University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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A recent parliamentary inquiry into passenger rail drew 1700 submissions, suggesting growing support for the return of long-distance trains in Aotearoa.

The government has committed the country to decarbonisation targets that require significant cuts to transport-related emissions. But decarbonising long-distance travel is not part of the plan – the national rail operator KiwiRail remains focused on freight.

We argue the revival of long-distance passenger rail needs to be part Aotearoa’s strategy to bring emissions down.

The arguments for intercity passenger rail centre on connecting communities, equity in transport options, reduced emissions and lower energy use.

The end of the decline?

After a long decline – detailed in André Brett’s history of the New Zealand network Can’t Get There From Here – there were some gains in 2022.

Following initial plans to turn it into a tourist train, the Northern Explorer is back running between Auckland and Wellington. Passenger numbers on Te Huia, a rail service between Auckland and Hamilton, have doubled – helped by half-price fares – since its launch in April 2021.

The commuter train Capital Connection attracts good passenger numbers on its week-day only run between Wellington and Palmerston North, despite old and unreliable rolling stock. Work is underway on improving passenger rail near Wellington.

Campaigning for rail

Several new campaigns are pushing for further improvements to passenger rail.

Save Our Trains is seeking a “comprehensive national strategy for inter-regional passenger rail services built around concerns for climate action, accessibility, affordability and economic development”.

Making Rail Work has developed a proposal to reinstate the Kaimai Express linking Auckland and Tauranga. A report for local government supported the case for more frequent services linking North Island towns.

Arguing for the restoration of the Auckland–Wellington night train, public transport planner Nicolas Reid suggested such a service “would have the potential to replace up to 150,000 long-distance car trips or flights per year”.

Most controversially, the group Restore Passenger Rail staged a series of nonviolent direct actions to draw attention to the issue, closing motorways and attempting (unsuccessfully) to address the cross-party inquiry into passenger rail from the top of a motorway gantry.

Rail cuts transport emissions

Transport comprises 45% of Aotearoa’s domestic carbon dioxide emissions, but it is hard to decarbonise. It requires a combination of changes to technology, behaviour and infrastructure. But the significant emission and energy benefits of using intercity and regional rail, rather than driving or flying, are well established globally.

New Zealand’s emissions reduction plan aims for a 20% reduction (per capita) in driving by 2035, through improved urban planning and better travel options. But it does not mention intercity rail.

As half of all kilometres driven are on the state highway network, this is a major omission. Auckland Council’s transport emission reduction plan also aims to reduce domestic aviation emissions by half by 2030, before promised electric or hydrogen-powered planes can make any real impact.

Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch are important, but they only comprise half the population. Travel within and between the smaller cities must also be decarbonised, or the whole country will fail its targets.

Transport investments misplaced

To reinstate fast and efficient passenger rail across Aotearoa, large capital and carbon investments are required. But that is partly because the rail network has been run down for decades, while considerable investment has gone into roads.

Yet, these new roads create more traffic. Further road building, such as an expressway between Ōtaki and Levin, is being promoted, even though we know this project has an extremely poor economic return and will induce more driving.

When good services are on offer, people tend to use them. In Auckland, the then rundown suburban train service was used by only one million people each year in 1994. But a range of improvements saw passenger numbers top 20 million in 2017, with further growth expected once the City Rail link is completed.

Demographic changes support the return of passenger rail. Aotearoa has an aging population, especially in its smaller centres. Many lack airports and driving can become problematic for older age groups. Small towns have also lost many services and visits to bigger centres for medical appointments and other services have become more important.

Most towns still have railway lines connecting them to larger centres. The remaining private coach network suffers from infrequent service, poor quality and a lack of connectivity and integrated ticketing. If, in the UK, the rich take trains and the poor take buses, we suspect in Aotearoa the rich fly or drive and the poor take the bus or don’t travel at all.

Not everyone drives, particularly children and old people; and of those who do drive, some would prefer not to. Internationally, we’ve seen a long-term decline in the number of young people gaining drivers’ licences.

For those living in larger urban centres with good public transport and biking infrastructure or in 15-minute neighbourhoods, there is far less need to own a car. To make the necessary cuts to transport emissions in our larger cities, we need to re-imagine car ownership as an option rather than a necessity.

It might be a lot to lay on the humble train, but civilisation is in a tight spot. We need to collectively halve emissions by 2030, while also laying the groundwork for a truly sustainable future. This means wise use of resources – long-lasting, economical infrastructure based on proven technology, combined with renewable electricity. Trains do that.

Robert McLachlan is professor in applied mathematics at Massey University. Paul Callister is senior associate at the Institute of Governance and Policy Studies, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The TV series The White Lotus has returned for a second season. Both series of The White Lotus explore the underbelly of resort tourism.

The first series is set in a resort in Hawaii and contains sex, drugs and outrageously selfish behaviour. Through its focus on the interactions between wealthy American guests and local resort staff, it explores complex themes including racial inequality, the ongoing impacts of colonialism, debates about land ownership and identity politics.

The second series is set in Sicily, but the first season gives us an interesting opportunity to reflect on the way tourism destinations are marketed to appeal to wealthy tourists.

International tourism campaigns try to market the perceived “essence” of what makes a country special. In the process, they often perpetuate stereotypes. Critical tourism scholars have long argued such branding tends to overemphasise and essentialise cultural difference.

Many of the problems satirised by The White Lotus are perpetuated by a recent advertising campaign by Tourism Fiji.

The Bulanaires campaign launched in 2019 encourages international tourists to visit Fiji. The phrase Bulanaires blends the term “billionaires” with the Fijian greeting “bula”, which implies wishes of good health.

A key message in the campaign is that Fijians may not be wealthy yet are “rich in happiness”.

The Bulanaires campaign is sophisticated, well-produced and full of charm and humour. However, our research into tourism tropes shows the advertising campaign also recycles some troubling stereotypes about Fijian people.

Firstly, like much advertising for the Pacific region and alongside a suite of related colonial stereotypes, the campaign romanticises poverty as a form of wellbeing. Secondly, it uncritically reinforces the colonially entrenched notion of the “happy native”.

The ‘happy native’ and the ‘smiling servant’

As they greet the incoming guests at the beginning of season one, the staff at The White Lotus are encouraged to “wave like they mean it” by their manager and to project “vagueness” to the visitors. This sense of blending into the background and performing the role of the subservient and smiling host is apparent in tourism advertising too.

In one Tourism Fiji advertisement, a smiling resort worker says to the camera “what makes me happy is seeing you happy”. Fijians are cast as the epitome of authentic happiness: pre-existing, pervasive and spontaneously felt and expressed.

The notion that all Fijians are authentically happy despite wealth disparities stems from, and reinforces, longstanding colonial tropes of the “happy native” being somehow free from the stressors of the rat race. Such fantasies are widely applied beyond the Pacific region.

As tourism academic Camille O’Reilly writes, these include “a nostalgic and naïve view of the ‘traditional’ life found outside the West, untouched by modernity but now rapidly disappearing“.

The question is not whether Fijians feel happy, but rather what the implications are of broadcasting these stereotypes of Fijian wellbeing to tourists.

The irony is that low paid work in the tourism industry often entangles them at the bottom of the capitalist hierarchy they are marketed as being untouched by.

Poverty and wellbeing

The awkward juxtapositions of wellbeing and poverty are explored in series one of The White Lotus via Jennifer Coolidge’s character Tanya, a wealthy and lonely tourist who tries to forge a relationship with her Hawaiian massage therapist.

The relationship veers further towards exploitation when Tanya hints she could invest in the massage therapist’s business, on the unspoken understanding the therapist pay her additional attention. The pairing – and the ultimately unrealised investment – highlights the uneven economic circumstances between the women. What constitutes “wellbeing” for the tourist can erode the host’s wellbeing.

The relationship between wellbeing and poverty is awkwardly apparent in the Tourism Fiji campaign, which suggests Fijians are happy, despite being far poorer than tourists. It goes even further to suggest poverty even enables happiness.

“We don’t get many billionaires around here” smiles a local in the advertisement, “but we have plenty of BULANAIRES!”

The advertisement exploits the lexicon of wellbeing and mindfulness to reassure tourists the Fijians who bring them their cocktails and look after their children are content with low wages.

Selling the connection to nature

National branding campaigns for Fiji, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands all depict Indigenous peoples as living somehow closer to nature than those who might wish to travel to visit them.

The advertising campaign Answer The Call To Vanuatu is a good example. “The call” connects tourists to Vanuatu by evoking a sense of existential loss and longing.

It features a conch shell trumpet sounding from an “untouched paradise” across the ocean and the internal voice of a prospective tourist crying out for adventure. It is selling escape from the rigours of everyday life, healing through connection to nature and a sense of human authenticity.

For locals, however, “answering the call” has nationalist connotations reminiscent of wartime recruitment campaigns. This message was perpetuated during Covid-19 travel bans where tourism campaigns hailed tourists through wistful narratives about future holidays, in which “the time will come to connect again” and, meanwhile, Indigenous people will “keep it beautiful for you”.

The White Lotus is a cleverly-written reminder about the colonial underpinnings of international tourism. It shows the ways in which the tourism industry is often bolstered by problematic cultural stereotypes; often complicit in widening the gap between rich and poor, visitors and hosts.

Philippa Chandler is a research fellow at The University of Melbourne, Edward Narain is a PhD candidate at RMIT University, John Taylor is senior lecturer in anthropology at La Trobe University, and Tarryn Phillips is senior lecturer in crime, justice and legal studies at La Trobe University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

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• The Travel and Tourism sector accounts for an estimated 11% of global emissions.
• While surveys reveal that 71% of travellers intend to travel more sustainably, there are still significant gaps between consumers’ intentions and behaviour.
• Here are the roadblocks that get in the way of intention and reality and some ways to generate a more virtuous and sustainable cycle for the industry.

As COP27 continues, the urgency and scale of addressing the global climate and environmental challenges are once again taking centre stage. Accounting for an estimated 11% of global emissions, a share that is expected to grow, the Travel and Tourism (T&T) sector will play a critical role in meeting global climate goals.

In this context, governments and investors have mounting pressure on the sector to reduce emissions and increase sustainability through more stringent emissions standards, green tax incentives, and growing ESG-linked investments. Moreover, an increasing number of consumers are indicating a preference for more sustainable travel options.

In response, many travel companies, such as airlines, have made improving sustainability and minimising greenhouse gas emissions key business goals. However, to achieve these goals and transition into a more sustainable future, T&T companies must successfully develop products that enable more sustainable travel choices.

A rising demand for sustainable travel

Recent studies and survey results indicate that travellers increasingly value sustainable travel, indicating an opportunity for sustainable travel products. In parallel, a survey by Booking.com found that four out of five global travellers agreed that sustainable travel is a priority for them, with 71% intending to travel more sustainably and 78% aiming to stay at a sustainable property at least once a year.

Concerning the environment, specifically, 69% of respondents to an Expedia survey confirmed that they want to lessen their environmental footprint, and 75% said they would like to use more environmentally-friendly modes of transport.

However, while travellers seem to indicate an increased willingness and demand for environmentally-friendly and sustainable products, the uptake of sustainable travel products anecdotally does not show the same accelerated trend just yet.

As sustainable offerings are relatively in their infancy, there is limited research on actual purchasing behaviour. Furthermore, recent surveys revealed that travellers prefer companies’ sustainability practices and offerings to be more transparent, intuitive, and easy to access.

Roadblocks to sustainable consumer behaviour

Additionally, industry interviews and research we are conducting have helped identify a range of roadblocks that explain the gap between consumers’ stated intentions and what they are doing in practice.

These roadblocks can be classified or clustered into six main categories:

1) Limited availability – The roadblock of availability centres around the lack of a sustainable product substitute within a company’s offering. This includes limited overall sustainable product options as well as sustainable products that are competitive with more traditional offerings.

2) Lack of awareness – This roadblock refers to travellers’ lack of awareness of sustainability challenges in T&T, sustainability behaviours that can help overcome these challenges, and sustainable products on offer.

3) Low credibility – Low credibility refers to consumers wanting a greater degree of reassurance and information about the claims companies make concerning the sustainability of their products. Product aspects like transparency, coherent reporting, certification and verified labelling are all tied to improving credibility.

4) Price premium – Generally, sustainable travel options are deemed more expensive than their traditional counterparts. As the willingness to pay a premium for a more sustainable product varies by customer segment and is ever-evolving, customers often drop out from purchasing the alternative due to the higher price.

5) Cumbersome purchase experience – Customers are often discouraged from purchasing sustainable products if the process is burdensome and counterintuitive.

6) Lack of rewards/acknowledgement – This roadblock refers to the need to make customers feel rewarded for their efforts, both physical and emotional. Tools in this space help people facilitate the publishing of their sustainability efforts on social media or provide recognition in physical environments.

Addressing the say-do-gaps

Companies that can provide sustainable offerings that address these say-do-gaps will be better positioned to meet customer needs. As a result, a virtuous cycle can be generated in which increased purchase of sustainable products leads to greater company performance, reinforcing further investment into such options. In turn, the increasing supply of sustainable products would make it easier for travellers to behave sustainably, helping the T&T sector in its net zero transition.

To make a case for investment in sustainable travel products, Accenture and the Forum are working to explore the say-do-gap further, provide an overview of existing sustainable travel products and configurations, develop recommendations for creating sustainable products, and present the industry with a call to action. The full report on this topic will be published in December.

Jesko Neuenburg is managing director and global travel & aviation sustainability lead at Accenture, David Walfisch is principal director of travel sustainability at Accenture, Natalie Nehme is manager of travel sustainability at Accenture, and Maksim Soshkin is research and analysis specialist at the World Economic Forum.

This article is republished from The World Economic Forum under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

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Cruise ships carrying passengers with Covid are back in the news. The Coral Princess, with an unconfirmed number of people testing positive on board, docked at Fremantle, Western Australia. The Quantum of The Seas, with passengers reportedly testing positive, is heading for Brisbane. There have been similar situations at other ports in New Zealand and the Pacific.

But this isn’t 2020. The cruise ship industry and health authorities have learned much from large outbreaks linked to the Ruby Princess and Diamond Princess cruise ships early in the pandemic.

Yet, there’s even more we can do to limit the impact of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes Covid) spreading from cruise ships to communities on land.

Why are we worried about cruise ships?

Cruise ships can have epidemics of a variety of infectious diseases, not just Covid, facilitated by large numbers of people in close proximity, especially during indoor social activities.

We know SARS-CoV-2 is spread mainly by inhaling contaminated air, so indoor activities may pose a risk if ventilation is poor.

Cruises typically last at least a week, which covers the incubation period for infections such as influenza and Covid. So all it takes is for one infected person to be on the ship to set off an epidemic.

Staff stay on ships much longer than passengers, and can continue to infect new passengers, perpetuating a cycle of outbreaks.

But almost half of infections are transmitted asymptomatically. So, without testing everyone on board (before they board and during outbreaks), infectious people can board a ship without being aware they are infected and cause an epidemic. Infected staff can also infect new passengers, and passengers can infect communities they visit on land.

What happened with cruise ships and Covid in 2020?

Early in the pandemic, large outbreaks on ships, such as the Diamond Princess made the headlines. Some 634 of 3,711 (17%) people on board tested positive for Covid. The ship was quarantined for two weeks.

An estimated 69% of transmissions on board were transmitted asymptomatically.

The Ruby Princess had a Covid outbreak in March 2020 with around 700 cases. Yet health authorities allowed passengers to disembark in Sydney without testing, who then dispersed around the country at a time we had no vaccines.

Our research showed this resulted in growing community clusters for weeks afterwards.

But it’s not 2020

We now have vaccines. But vaccination rates vary globally (and cruise passengers are often from many countries). Some vaccines are less effective than others, not everyone is up-to-date with their booster shots, vaccine immunity wanes (even after having a booster), and current vaccines are generally less effective against currently circulating Omicron subvariants.

This means people can be infected and infectious despite being vaccinated.

Many of us have also had Covid, especially in 2022. But our immunity following infection (whether or not we’re also up to date with our vaccines) wanes too. People who were infected with older variants may also have a dampened immune response to Omicron, which means limited protection.

Cruise ships and health authorities have also tightened up their Covid protocols.

The New South Wales government, for instance, publishes on its website the Covid risk of incoming vessels. It places ships in one of three categories according to a number of factors, including the number of Covid cases on board.

Cruise ships also have strict protocols for controlling and managing outbreaks. This includes masks for close contacts, mandatory isolation for infected passengers for five days, and testing of anyone with symptoms.

The problem is that transmission can continue because of asymptomatic infections. The ship may need medical evacuations or assistance for severely ill people. There is also the problem of infection being transmitted to communities on shore after people without symptoms disembark.

We can do more

People disembarking and unknowingly spreading the virus is especially a problem for small towns.

The itinerary of the Coral Princess, which has since been modified, included the Western Australian towns of Broome and Geraldton, both of which have large Aboriginal communities, and other towns, such as Albany and Busselton.

Small towns may not have a hospital, may have limited access to health care, and would not have capacity to deal with many severely ill patients. Capacity for medical evacuations are also limited.

Most hospitals are near Perth and the southwest coast. Broome has one hospital with about 40 beds. Large hospitals in Perth and Darwin are about 2,000 kilometres away, which would be the destinations for medical evacuations of severely ill patients.

So it’s important to monitor for outbreaks in Broome after the Coral Princess docked there this week, and ensure availability of testing to enable early intervention (such as antiviral drugs) to control outbreaks.

Cruises with outbreaks on board should ideally avoid small towns or remote locations with limited health services or vulnerable populations, as the impacts on these communities may be much greater than in a large city.

Visiting small towns during an on-board epidemic would be safer if everyone who disembarks is tested first, is negative, and wears a mask on shore.

What else could we do?

The cruising industry has acknowledged the reality of Covid being a continuing threat. This could be improved by recognising the role of asymptomatic transmission in testing policies.

For instance, all passengers and crew should have a negative rapid antigen test at the start of the cruise, and during an outbreak. All close contacts and all disembarking passengers should be tested for Covid, regardless of symptoms. The cost of testing would be much less than the lost costs of large epidemics.

During a cruise epidemic, companies also need to consider the locations being visited, how much Covid is already present there (some remote towns have very little Covid) and available healthcare systems for locals.

Rapid use of antivirals may also help to control epidemics on board as these allow passengers testing positive to clear the virus faster.

The aviation industry does well in providing safe air in-flight. The cruise industry has also started changing ventilation to add fresh air instead of recirculated air indoors.

But there is still some way to go before we can say the threat of Covid is over, on board or on land.

C Raina MacIntyre is a Professor of Global Biosecurity, NHMRC Principal Research Fellow, Head, Biosecurity Program, Kirby Institute at UNSW Sydney; Ashley Lindsaw Quigley is a research assistant at UNSW Sydney; and Samsung Lim is Associate Professor, Biosecurity Program, The Kirby Institute from UNSW Sydney.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

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Tourism operator Clinton Walker from Ngurrangga Tours and Charles Darwin University researchers Nicole Curtin and Tracy Woodroffe speak out.

An application from Traditional Owners to block the construction of a fertiliser plant near ancient rock art in the Pilbara was denied by the federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek [last] week. This decision is deeply concerning, and points to a much larger problem with Indigenous heritage management.

Plibersek says she went with the views of the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation in making her decision, calling it the “most representative organisation on cultural knowledge” in the region. Yet, she also acknowledged that these views don’t represent all Traditional Owner perspectives in the area.

Save Our Songlines, a separate organisation of Murujuga Traditional Owners, oppose the fertiliser plant, which they say poses a threat to sacred rock art sites. They say the minister’s decision is “based on faulty reasoning and false conclusions”.

In 2020, the world reacted in horror when Rio Tinto lawfully destroyed Juukan Gorge – sacred Aboriginal rock shelters in the Pilbara some 46,000 years old. Broader community understanding of the value of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledges for looking after Country can help us avoid repeating this tragedy. Tourism and community education is an important way to do that.

‘Enough is enough’

The A$4.5 billion Perdaman fertiliser plant will be constructed in the World Heritage nominated Murujuga National Park in Western Australia. It is home to the world’s largest rock art gallery, with more than one million images scattered across the entire Burrup Peninsula and Dampier Archipelago.

As many as 20 sacred sites may be impacted by the plant, according to Save Our Songlines.

In an interview with ABC Radio National, Plibersek said the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation have agreed that some of these rock carvings can be moved safely, and others can be protected on site even if the plant goes ahead.

However, the situation isn’t so clear cut. For example, the ABC revealed that the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation refused permission to move the rock art sites multiple times, preferring they remain undisturbed. Elders finally agreed after receiving advice that this wasn’t possible.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen issues regarding consultation processes with Traditional Owners, such as during the notorious battle for the Kimberley against a major gas plant in 2012.

Traditional Owner and co-author Clinton Walker has been sharing his intimate knowledge of the Pilbara with visitors through his tourism venture Ngurrangga Tours for the past 11 years. He has the cultural authority and capacity to speak for his Country.

Clinton was a signatory on the open letter from Traditional Owners and Custodians of Murujuga concerning threats to cultural heritage in the area. He describes the potential impact of the fertiliser plant:

“This hill is a very very sacred site to my people. If they build their plant here we’re not gonna have the same access we do now to go visit our rock art and teach our kids and family their culture.

“This impact is going to damage our culture and it will damage us as the Traditional Owners because we’re connected to these sites in a spiritual way. I want people to know how important these sites are. We need to protect them. Enough is enough.”

The need for consent

The federal inquiry into the Juukan Gorge disaster highlighted the need for free, prior and informed consent from any affected Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander group.

The inquiry also called for the removal of so-called “gag clauses” from land-use agreements, which prevent Aboriginal people from speaking out against developers.

Save Our Songlines Traditional Owners say principles from the inquiry aren’t being upheld, and are concerned gag clauses are silencing members of the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation.

We find it deeply problematic that Plibersek did not acknowledge these concerns around gag clauses in announcing her approval of the fertiliser plant. It is the role of the government to keep industry accountable for their obligations to abide by Indigenous heritage laws and to ensure proper consultation processes are undertaken.

This decision is also not in line with the federal government’s vocal commitment to the environment and to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs prior to winning the election.

In a submission to the United Nations about how to “decolonise our legal system”, Nyikina Warrwa Indigenous leader and respected researcher Professor Anne Poelina said:

“If the Lawful Laws which are awful, are enabled as lawful, what chance do Indigenous people and our lands, water, lifeways, and livelihoods stand against destruction?”

Understanding Indigenous connection to Country

Non-Indigenous people need to better understand the importance of Country for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Classrooms are a good place to start.

Deficits in the Australian education system have led to poor knowledge and frequent and pervasive misunderstandings of Aboriginal people, places and cultures. A psychological hangover from White Australia’s assimilation policies persists.

When school education doesn’t provide accurate and truthful accounts of Australian histories, harmful stereotypes are left unchallenged.

Clinton Walker describes a common response from visitors on his tours showcasing the culture, Country and history of the Pilbara:

“People say ‘how the hell don’t we know that? Why have we never learnt this stuff?’”

Improvements in education have been slow. For example, the Australian Institute for Teacher and School Leadership only released their report “Building a culturally responsive Australian teaching workforce” in June this year.

Resources to support teachers are said to be scheduled for release in the coming months.

Learn about country through tourism

Tourism is one context where the visibility and recognition of Indigenous people as knowledge-holders can be promoted and celebrated.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tourism operators are delivering truthful accounts of Australian history and telling their stories of their connection to Country and culture. This work is an emotional labour as they challenge entrenched colonial narratives.

Indigenous tourism operators are agents of reconciliation. Operators speak about wanting to educate visitors to build awareness of social and environmental issues facing their communities. The potential destruction of cultural sites at Murujuga is one such issue.

Ongoing research from lead-author Nicole Curtin involves conversations with Aboriginal tourism operators and their visitors. It finds that deep listening is required for visitors to interrogate their own biases and privileges during their tourism experience. Visitors must be willing to “go and sit and learn” about Indigenous sovereignty and knowledges in their own lives.

Indeed, an enhanced sense of connection to our local communities may help to drive people to speak out about the destruction of sites of environmental and cultural significance.

Raising community awareness to fuel social momentum is one way of exerting pressure on decision makers to protect Australia’s rich cultural heritage and environment.

Nicole Curtin is a PhD Candidate at Charles Darwin University, Clinton Walker is a tourism operator, Indigenous Knowledge, and Tracy Woodroffe is a lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges at Charles Darwin University.

The authors acknowledge the Bininj, Larrakia, Noongar, Ngarluma, Yindjibarndi and Yawuru peoples as the Traditional Owners of Country where this article, and their research, was conducted and written. The authors pay their respects to Elders past and present.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

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The metaverse can be defined as a set of virtual shared spaces that are indexed in the real world and accessible via 3D interaction. It is a term that has been rapidly gaining ground in the media landscape ever since Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced the creation of the Meta Group.

While some people remain cautious or resistant to the idea, others see this technological evolution as an opportunity to develop new offers. Given tourism is a sector that moves forward largely in line with information and communication technologies, it is entirely relevant to look at how it could integrate this virtual universe.

So how could the metaverse take over tourism, a practice that requires physical travel?

Can tourism and technology work together?

There is a clear correlation between the development of tourism and that of technology. Indeed, from the computerised booking centres of the 1970s to the domestication of the Internet in the late 1990s, technology has always been used in tourism to develop new practices.

The metaverse is part of this evolution of the Internet, which deploys increasingly immersive technologies to offer ‘phygital’ experiences – i.e., that blur boundaries between the real and the virtual.

Whether it be for museums, national parks or heritage sites, the health crisis has also enabled many organisations to increase and sustain their use of technological tools to offer virtual reality tours.

The Fly Over Zone application, as well as offering an exploration of World Heritage cultural sites, shows users what damaged sites would have looked like in their original state.

Web giant Amazon launched “Amazon Explore”, allowing people to “travel the world, virtually”. This venture is an interactive live-streaming service, which they say allows you to discover new places from your computer. Although this service is still in its infancy, with a beta version it is likely that these virtual tours will progress to offer even more immersive formats.

When it comes to tourism, Asia is a forerunner, with proposals such as the Seoul Metaverse project, which aims to become the first major city in the world to enter the metaverse, with a tourist route reproducing the city’s main sites.

But it is in France that we find one of the most successful projects with MoyaLand, a virtual tourism realm including a tourist office, museums, an airport and a historical centre where inhabitants and tourists can move around virtually via their avatars.

Other tourism stakeholders could follow suit, with 25% of people forecast to spend at least one hour a day in the metaverse by 2026, according to the American company Gartner. So how will people experience tourism in this virtual environment?

Using the metaverse to inspire travel

There are two main trends defining the tourism experience: the first is related to the process, with a transformation of the world into knowledge, the second is about the moment, with a focus on hedonism and feelings of success. While by definition, tourism requires physical travel, there is a contradiction in the tourism experiences offered by the metaverse. The metaverse cannot replace physical travel, but can create the desire to travel.

In the immersive reality of the metaverse, technological devices feed the user with sensations such as sight, hearing, touch and even smell. Besides acquisition costs, the use of these new devices calls into question the perception of the senses connecting humans to their environment.

The metaverse results from the interaction between a device, a user putting themselves in the shoes of a tourist, and other spectators. Although the experience is virtual, the senses are indeed put to work by stimulating certain situations that are desired but not accessible at the time.

Through immersion, the virtual reality headset or haptic sensors allow us to experience things that were previously intangible and to reconnect with the senses. Through an avatar, the metaverse user can embody a tourist by creating a virtual tour route, interacting with other avatars and consequently imagining how they feel, stimulating what Giacomo Rizzolatti calls mirror neurons.

Societal and environmental constraints

Whether imitated, reproduced or simulated, travel and holidays are touristic practices that provide a break from everyday life. They’re also an opportunity for some to see their loved ones or to engage in activities that are difficult to do in everyday life.

Observing animals in a safari, discovering archaeological sites or practising a foreign language are activities that produce unique, essential bodily and spiritual sensations different from those produced virtually by metaverse devices.

Moreover, the metaverse, which is in itself a technological development of the Internet, is not yet complete. It requires financial investment and the construction of a regulatory framework to control user behaviour.

For when Mark Zuckerberg expresses his desire to create a virtual and alternative world in which users can also travel, we must not lose sight of the fact that users’ data will be put to use.

And while some people see the metaverse as a solution to avoid flying and move toward sustainable tourism, the digital pollution it will create could well work against this ‘virtuous’ form of tourism.

Although tourism in the metaverse will not be able to replace outdoor experiences, some tourism professionals could use it to promote sites that are not easily accessible or are ignored by tourists, who can discover them virtually.

Naïma Aïdi is a PhD student in information and communication sciences at the from Dicen-IdF laboratory, Tourism and Smart Tourism at Gustave Eiffel University in France.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

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A recent survey of New Zealand workplaces revealed more than a third have no workplace well-being plan in place. Yet it is necessary, now more than ever, for organisations to understand what a healthy work environment looks like and to provide it for their employees.

The 2015 Health and Safety at Work Act requires workplaces to look after the physical and mental health and well-being of their staff. This means looking at work through a health and safety lens and understanding the risks that affect people’s well-being at work.

For many organisations, the legislation took them into new and unknown territory. Our experience working with organisations was that, understandably, many efforts initially focused on managing stress and mental illness only after they occurred.

However, evidence clearly points to the importance of having a proactive strategy to prevent psychological harm occurring in the first place – having the fence at the top of the cliff as well as the ambulance at the bottom.

The issue of workplace burnout has received lots of attention of late, particularly in relation to people working in the health sector. But, even beyond this, there is clear evidence aspects of work design, organisation and management as well as employees’ social and environmental context play a major role in workers’ psychological and physical health.

These psychosocial factors should be the focus of workplace well-being plans. Failure to address them can directly contribute to mental health problems in employees, including depression.

Recommendations for a well-being plan

A recent World Health Organization (WHO) report on mental health listed three key recommendations to prevent mental ill health at work:

1. organisational interventions to identify, remove or mitigate psychosocial risks
2. mental health training for managers to identify and support healthy work practices and healthy workers
3. interventions for employees to increase their personal coping capacity.

Historically, many workplaces have focused on the last recommendation. But to focus solely on boosting individuals’ coping abilities can place the blame on the person and mask the impact of broader environmental factors.

Our experience working with organisations suggests interventions that only target individuals and not the broader organisation implicitly give the message that employees are to blame if they’re not “resilient enough” to cope with overwhelming workloads and unmanageable deadlines.

Individually focused interventions can also be met with cynicism and lack of buy-in from employees.

Feedback from managers and staff leaders indicates many have monitored employee well-being implicitly and spontaneously in the past (for example, noting when a team member is looking down or feeling upset). But with many workplaces moving to hybrid models of staff working partly from home, these strategies may no longer be effective.

Training managers to spot signs of languishing in people working remotely is a new but much-needed component of many well-being plans.

Considering employees’ personal circumstances

There are a few tips organisations should keep in mind when implementing these recommendations.

Firstly, it’s crucial to ask employees about what is stressing them. Use this information as a basis for your plan. It is vital to use a form of survey or assessment developed specifically for this purpose, rather than just guessing or assuming you know what your people think. This means you can track changes in well-being over time.

Secondly, involving employees in the design of any well-being plan will likely increase buy-in and improve uptake of any interventions.

Thirdly, employers need to consider both work and non-work factors. Some work factors may be obvious (such as bullying, high workload, exposure to traumatic material), while others may be less so (level of autonomy at work, being consulted about change) yet still critical. Non-work factors may include financial stress and parenting or relationship difficulties.

Some organisations may blanch at the thought of a workplace helping with aspects of employees’ private lives. But to do so may be a crucial component in contributing towards their well-being.

In addition to reducing risks, a good well-being plan promotes positive aspects of a workplace. These are the things that make employees want to be there, such as a great office environment, a culture of appreciation, and “fringe benefits” that come with the job.

Psychological well-being in the workplace may still be relatively new territory for many organisations and it’s tempting to pluck the low-hanging fruit by simply providing some extra tools to workers. A comprehensive well-being plan that addresses psychosocial factors will help expand interventions and prove the old adage that prevention is better than cure.

Amanda Wallis and Erika Clarry at Umbrella Wellbeing contributed to this article.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

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The travel and tourism sector was one of the hardest hit by the Covid-19 pandemic, leaving not only companies but also tourism-driven economies severely affected by shutdowns, travel restrictions and the disappearance of international travel.

In 2020 alone, the sector lost US$4.5tr and 62 million jobs, impacting the living standards and well-being of communities across the globe. Moreover, the halt in international travel gave both leisure and business travellers the chance to consider the impact of their choices on the climate and environment.

Amid shifting demand dynamics and future opportunities and risks, a more inclusive, sustainable and resilient travel and tourism sector can be – and needs to be – built.

The World Economic Forum’s Travel & Tourism Development Index 2021 finds that embedding inclusivity, sustainability and resilience into the travel and tourism sector as it recovers, will ensure it can continue to be a driver of global connectivity, peace and economic and social progress.

What are some of the top global trends you’re witnessing currently in the travel and tourism sector?

Liz Ortiguera: Given the extended lockdown that we had on travel with the pandemic, vacation for friends and relatives (VFR) is now a high priority for people who haven’t been in touch for a long time thanks to the pandemic. So, people are reconnecting.

And that kind of links to the second trend, which is multi-purpose or blended travel. Never before, particularly now that we can connect digitally through Zoom, has the ability to work from anywhere enabled travellers to cover multiple purposes, like visits with friends and multiple business trips.

So, we’ll find that the duration of travel and the length of stay is longer. And third is the continued high focus on safety and wellness which is top of mind for travellers due to the pandemic. All travel is wellness-related now.

Sandra Carvao: I think there is a bigger concern with sustainability, which is very welcome in our industry. Consumers, particularly the younger generation, are much more aware of the impact they have, not only on the environment but also socially and on the communities they live in. We’ve also seen an increase in expenditure per trip, so I think people are very eager to go outside, and they’re staying longer.

And on the other side, I think there are some challenges: we’re seeing a rise in late bookings because restrictions can change at short notice and that’s having an impact on the decisions of travellers. This is putting pressure on the industry in terms of planning and anticipating fluctuations in demand.

What is community-based tourism and why is it important?

Sandra Carvao: One of the positive impacts of the pandemic is that people are looking for local experiences and are spending more time with communities. So, the concept of community-based tourism is obviously one that puts the community at the core of every development, ensuring that it’s engaged and empowered and that it benefits.

At the UNWTO, we worked with the G20 and the Saudi presidency back in 2020 and produced a framework for tourism development in communities, which states that communities need to be part of the planning and management of tourism activities. We need to go beyond traditional definitions of community to a point where the industry leans on partnerships between the public and private sectors and communities.

Liz Ortiguera: In July 2022, PATA is hosting a destination-marketing forum and one of the key themes is community-based tourism. The purpose is really to put the community and authenticity-in-culture activities at the heart of the travel experience. There are benefits for all stakeholders.

One is that travellers can have an authentic experience. They’re not in overcrowded, touristic locations and they experience something new and unique within the community. These experiences are designed in partnership with communities who get the benefit of financial inclusion, and if activities are designed properly, the reinforcement of their cultural heritage.

Governments also engage in economic development more broadly across countries. Another interesting trend is creative tourism, which means you create an experience for tourists to participate in, like a dance lesson, or a cooking lesson.

Social media surveys have shown that travellers who have these kinds of immersive experiences are more likely to post about them online and that’s good for the industry.

How is technology and innovation helping to leverage cultural resources?

Sandra Carvao: One interesting trend we’re seeing is that more and more people are booking trips directly, so communities need to be supported to digitise their systems.

Education and upskilling of communities are important so that they can leverage digital platforms to market themselves. From the tourists’ perspective, it is important to emphasise that virtual experiences, while they are a fun tool, can never replace visiting a destination.

Liz Ortiguera: People have been living virtually for more than two years. Amazing innovations have emerged, such as virtual reality and augmented reality, and all kinds of applications and tools.

But the important thing is the experience. The destination. Real-world experiences need to remain front and centre. Technology tools should be viewed as enablers and not the core experience. And when it comes to staff, technology can really democratise education.

There’s an opportunity to mobilise a mobile-first approach for those who are on the frontlines, or out in the field, and can’t easily access computers, but need to get real-time information.

How is the sector dealing with labour shortages and re-employment of the workforce?

Liz Ortiguera: Labour shortages are much more dynamic in North America and in Europe. But it’s having a knock-on effect on Asia. If, for example, their air carriers are limited by staff and they have to cancel flights, which we’re very much seeing out of Europe, seating capacity then becomes a limiting factor in the recovery of Asia Pacific. That’s the main constraint right now. And compounding that is the rising price of fuel. But people in the Asia Pacific are keen to get reemployed.

Sandra Carvao: Labour shortages are a priority for the sector in countries around the world. Many workers left the sector during the pandemic and the uncertainty that surrounded the measures taken to contain it left many people unsure of whether the sector would recover.

It is time to address things like conditions, scheduling, and work/life balance, all things which have been top of mind for workers during the pandemic. As the sector recovers, we need time to bring new hires on board and to train them to take over where those who switched jobs left off.

Are we seeing a growing trend towards domestic tourism?

Sandra Carvao: We’re talking about 9 billion people travelling within their own countries. And in many countries, for example in Germany, more than 80% of the tourism spending actually comes from the domestic market, similarly in countries like Spain and even smaller economies.

Whenever it’s possible to travel again, domestic markets tend to be more resilient. They kick off first mostly due to perceptions of safety and security issues. As the world economy recovers from the pandemic, there is a good opportunity for nations to rethink their strategy, look at the domestic market in a different way, and leverage different products for domestic tourists.

When it comes to sustainable tourism, how quickly could we mainstream eco-friendly modes of transportation?

Sandra Carvao: Transport is one of the key contributors to energy impacts and tourism. But it’s also important that we look at the whole value chain. The UNWTO together with the One Planet Sustainable Tourism Programme just launched the Glasgow Declaration, which includes green commitments from destinations and companies.

We’re seeing a strong movement in the airline industry to reduce emissions. But I think, obviously, technological developments will be very important. But it’s also very important to look at market shifts. And we can’t forget small islands and developing states that rely on long-haul air travel. It’s important to make sure that we invest in making the problem much less impactful.

Liz Ortiguera: ‘Travel and tourism’ is such a broad encompassing term that it’s not fair to call it an industry: it is actually a sector of many industries. The pandemic taught us how broad the impact of the sector is in terms of sustainability.

There’s a big movement in terms of destination resilience, which is the foundation for achieving sustainability in the journey to net-zero. We now have standards to mitigate that impact including meetings-and-events (MIE) standards and standards for tour operators.

There are multiple areas within our industry where progress is being made. And I’m really encouraged by the fact that there is such a focus not just within the sector but also among consumers.

This article is republished from the World Economic Forum under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

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The hotel industry is among the sectors that received the biggest blow during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic. With new infection cases rising recently, here’s what we can learn from their experiences to prepare for future crises.

The global pandemic – with quarantine periods, closing borders, and travel limitations – led hospitality and tourism businesses suffering tremendous losses. During the early months of the pandemic, Indonesia’s hotel occupancy rate fell to only 19.7% in March 2020, compared with 52.3% in the same month last year.

Our research explores the various challenges the hotel managers faced and how they responded to them.

To anticipate problems due to rising infections, we suggest hotel managers take deliberate actions to protect visitors and employees. Given the multi-stakeholder nature of the industry, hotels need to engage with the government and industry associations in formulating policy in times of crisis. They must also align with labour unions to provide safety nets for their terminated workers.

Repercussions and challenges in the industry

In March 2020, we conducted semi-structured interviews with hotel managers in three prominent tourist places in Indonesia: Jakarta, Bandung and Bali – to map their challenges and the strategies they devised.

We found that hotels mulled between halting operations or permanently shutting down the hotels. Layoffs impacted all job levels, from the senior management level (50% – 75% of positions were cut) to the lowest positions such as admin staff (50% of positions were cut).

Another issue was the discord between the corporate offices, regional offices, and property management to open or close the property in the following year. Payments to vendors and suppliers were hampered, raising concerns about future relations between hotels and goods suppliers.

The implemented strategies were a quick adjustment to face the pandemic. But it was harmful to the economy and the sector in the long run. Massive layoffs increased unemployment rates and dragged down economic growth, affecting businesses’ ability to recover.

Current implemented strategies to mitigate the crisis

Hotels implemented several strategies to mitigate the crisis.

First, the hotels’ management limited infection spread in their properties. The interactions between hotel employees and guests are pivotal to meeting guests’ needs during their stay. However, the pandemic disrupted such interactions. Thus, managers enforced safety measures to improve health and safety, including by doing compulsory testing on employees.

While understandable, this could create anxiety for hotel guests and employees. For example, the decision to track guests’ trip history could be intrusive to guests’ privacy and change their perception of how the hotel protects their anonymity and confidentiality. Compulsory tests could backfire because it could result in distrust among employees, who could start accusing and blaming other employees, thus creating a poor work environment.

Thus, hotels must examine further how one policy can affect other issues.

Second, most participants believed they had to compromise their offering to generate income. Several hotels produced new product packages – such as discounted prices – to raise occupancy and revenues. Managers also compromised the services offered, like reducing room cleaning to once every three days and offering frozen food, allowing them to provide lower prices. They also offered rooms for medics and quarantining infected patients.

Compromising services, such as providing frozen food often deemed cheap and unhealthy, might tarnish the hotel’s reputation. Offering the property as a quarantine hotel also could be a double-edged sword. It might help the hotel build its brand reputation and image. At the same time, it can dilute brand equity. There might be a negative perception that the hotel is unsafe because it might carry the virus.

Hence, while applying this strategy, hotel management must calculate whether the benefits surpass the costs.

Third, all participants revealed that hotels had to reduce their labour. They had to furlough employees to balance their financial situation. Another alternative was to provide employees with the option of unpaid and paid leave. Many managers pursued a temporary salary reduction to save jobs.

The decision to lay off employees to minimise labour costs might be crucial in facing a crisis. However, such a decision could lead to dysfunctional management. Laying off employees may also increase the unemployment rate and disrupt the economy, affecting hotels. Hotels, labour unions and the government should therefore work together to find the best solution.

What hotel managers can do to improve these strategies

Our study reveals that the repercussions and challenges provide a complex situation for hospitality businesses. This is because the tourism and hospitality industry cannot be separated from other issues (sociocultural, economic and political).

For example, neglecting health issues to pursue a financial objective would increase the risk of returning to a zero-sum game – both the hotel staff and guests are exposed to health risks, and the businesses might have to face forced shutdowns. Managers should deliberate their responses and strategies cautiously because they can be beneficial and detrimental.

The hospitality industry should work with its stakeholders to find the best solution. It is important to ensure strong coordination between businesses, branch organisations (e.g., associations), and governments. Businesses and branch organisations should also be involved in developing regulations and policies.

During the early months of the pandemic, there were only minimum interactions between stakeholders, considering how uninformed everyone about the virus at that time. As such, hotels could only rely their strategy based on those of their parent companies or other hotels abroad. This situation has improved overtime and the government has started to involve businesses in policy making.

It is also essential to effectively manage supply chain issues – such as food provision and complimentary hotel items – given they were heavily affected by closed borders. For example, managers can phase out “just-in-time” method (buying materials before they are needed) but instead shopping only when necessary, encourage domestic and substitution sources for strategic goods, and accelerate the digitisation of the supply chain. Also, all stakeholders in the supply chain need to develop new agreements to help increase the sustainability of their business, like redesigning their payment structures.

How can the government improve its response?

The [Indonesian] government reacted to the pandemic by issuing a Kartu Pra-Kerja (pre-work card) incentive program for furlough employees. This incentive consists of online upskill training and financial benefits. However, most furlough employees hesitated to register because of the complicated process. The incentives were difficult to access because of limited internet infrastructure, low technological understanding, and messy public data.

There is usually a gap between establishing and executing regulations and policies in developing countries. This condition is particularly so in a complex country such as Indonesia, with 34 provincial governments. The central government and local governments should work together to monitor the execution of these regulations and policies.

While the pandemic is seemingly under control, the recent spike in infection cases indicates that businesses should still be wary of potential crises. It is never too late to look back and learn from the past to anticipate what is yet to come.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

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Aotearoa New Zealand will enjoy a new official public holiday on 24 June, with the country marking Matariki – the start of the Māori New Year. But with it comes the temptation for businesses to use the day to drive sales.

Some Māori have already expressed concern that businesses were positioning themselves to market Matariki as a shopping event.

On the back of those concerns, Skye Kimura, chief executive of Māori cultural marketing and communications agency Tātou, launched a campaign called “Matariki is not for sale”. “No one wants to see a Matariki Big Mac,” she argued.

But those trying to defend Matariki from mass commercialisation could be fighting a difficult battle.

Few public holidays, either in New Zealand and elsewhere, have been immune to commercial interests. In the United States, for example, businesses are facing criticism for attempting to make money from Juneteenth, a holiday to celebrate the emancipation of slaves.

Human tendency to mark the change

One of the difficulties facing critics of the commercialisation of public holidays is that they may be fighting deep habits born out of capitalism and human nature.

A lot of our special occasions are structured around various parts of the year and changes in the pattern of life. The earliest pagan rituals were about the change in seasons and to mark what was different from one period of life to the next.

From a social and possibly evolutionary perspective, we are already primed to do something different from our day-to-day activities to mark the significant changes we see around us.

When we have these seasonal celebrations, it doesn’t take much of a nudge for retailers to say, hey, people are looking to mark the change and shopping is a really good way to enact that transition between two phases – an “out with old, in with the new” message.

Shopping to celebrate is what we do

Each year is already punctuated with several cultural celebrations that have, over time, become shopping events. The most classic example is the commercialisation of Christmas.

Even though there is the Christian tradition of the three wise men giving gifts at the birth of Christ, establishing the ritual of gift giving, the three months leading up to December 25 have become about sales and opportunities to spend.

Easter, Valentine’s Day, Queen’s Birthday weekend and even Labour Day have all become sales events for retailers.

Matariki also lands in a quiet time of the year for retail – right in the middle of winter and between the big shopping weekends of Queen’s Birthday and Labour Day.

Potential for blowback against retailers

But when businesses commercialise anything there is always the question of whether they have the legitimacy to do so, or whether they’re bastardising the event for commercial gain.

There is the potential for significant blowback for businesses looking to cash in on Matariki. And they only need to look at Anzac Day as an example of commemoration that remains off-limits to blatant commercialisation.

Yes, it’s fine to sell poppies or to have a donation box at your point of sale. It’s even okay to advertise with a “thank you for your service” banner. But if a business tries obviously to make money on the back of Anzac Day, people start to get a little upset.

That doesn’t mean businesses don’t try to get around public sentiment. Every year there is an element of “Anzac washing”, where companies try to make it look like they’re supportive of veterans, even if they have otherwise done nothing to support former and current military personnel.

It is likely that how we handle Anzac Day will provide a baseline for critics assessing businesses that try to use Matariki as a way to drive sales.

Businesses could be judged by whether or not they have Matariki sales, or whether there is some sort of attempt to “Matariki-wash” their other commercial offerings.

Businesses should tread carefully

It is an area full of potential landmines, with little clear benefit at this stage.

Not only is there the commercialisation of a public holiday, which some people find annoying already, but there’s also the debate about cultural appropriation versus cultural appreciation.

Companies need to realise the potential for blowback and controversy is multiplied above other, more established public holidays. There are those who are annoyed about another public holiday adding labour costs for businesses. And there even are those objecting to the supposed “wokeness” of celebrating Matariki.

At a bare minimum, then, businesses determined to use Matariki as part of their sales pitch need to understand what the celebration is really about and its significance within the community.

It will be interesting to see if any are willing to risk the minefield for the sake of sales that come from an extra three-day weekend, or whether they’ll wait and see what happens to those who take the risk first.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

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The Tourism Export Council of New Zealand was not expecting any funding support in the 2022 Budget after asking Tourism Minister Stuart Nash for support in February 2022 – because it was urgently needed by businesses – and receiving a letter in May saying there was no intention to provide any further funding for inbound tour operators that are the conduit between New Zealand businesses and offshore travel partners.

When we saw $54.2m scroll across the TV screen for the tourism sector, we were delightfully surprised. Then we saw the word ‘innovation’ and slumped a bit. Why? Because international tourism businesses are still in survival mode and looking to innovate is a nice to have, not a priority when you have families and staff trying to put food on the table and cover their family and business bills.

The industry needs sector survival funding, not sector innovation funding.

Realising the $54.2m has come about from unspent Strategic Tourism Assets Protection Programme (2020) funding and Tourism Communities recovery package (2021) funding was also surprising.

In February 2022, TECNZ had already asked MBIE and the Minister for any unspent funds from these two initiatives to be reallocated to where the real need is. TECNZ submitted a business case showing where the need was on a per segment basis (from an industry survey) to highlight where any new investment would best produce a return on investment for the government’s previous investment in 2020 and 2021.

Based on receipt of the Minister’s letter say no further funding was available and then finding out there have been funds is a little perplexing. Our sector is still under immense stress and the anxiety business owners have had to endure would greatly have been alleviated if this funding was available earlier.

The fact that there’s no detail on how the funds will be distributed and what the criteria is to apply for the new fund is frustrating. We are not sure if the businesses that really need funding support will meet the criteria, we really hope so. There is a concern due to the high focus in the following areas:

• Climate: Reduce carbon emissions in the tourism sector or have a positive impact on the climate.
  The industry has always had a strong focus on environmentally sustainability and climate change over decades since Green Globe 21 was introduced in the 1990s, then Earthcheck in 2000s and over 1200 businesses have already signed up to the UN Sustainability Development Goals. Climate and sustainability is not a new thing for tourism. Can we improve? Always.
• Sustainability: increase the resilience or environmental sustainability of tourism.
  Any tourism business that has managed to survive, still operate and be a positive contributor to their community deserves some support. Other comments on environment noted above.
• Technology: lift productivity or capability of the tourism sector through technology-based solutions.
  Many of our businesses implemented new technologies over past decades and use AR, VR, IR and all the Rs. Can we improve and be even more innovative? Yes, always.

Over the past two years businesses have had a chance to think about their futures, and in time, will look at implementing new products and experiences.

However, businesses need practical funding support now so they can recruit staff and get out of first gear, become operational and be ready to welcome back visitors. We very much hope the international tourism businesses who have already proven their resilience to stay operating after two years with either zero or only 20%-30% of pre-Covid revenue have proven they deserve a helping hand with this latest fund.

We must focus on the most practical form of investment to ensure there is a quality international tourism offering in the future. If some businesses can’t get support from the latest fund, New Zealand’s global reputation will continue to be at risk if we can’t recruit staff and plan with confidence and meet ‘brand NZ’ visitor expectations. The demand is there. Business owners will do their best.

The best way for the government to support the rebuild of New Zealand’s international tourism offering is to listen to the specialists (TECNZ) who have been bringing visitors here for 50 years, successfully growing it to be the country’s No. 1 export industry before Covid-19 struck.

We urge the government to listen and act on specialist advice to maximise their ROI over the past two years, which has been appreciated. We’d like to work in partnership and be part of the conversation going forward.

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A Florida court recently overturned mask mandates on planes in the United States, saying the directive was unlawful. That decision is now under appeal.

Before that, Australian comedian Celeste Barber told her social media followers a passenger sitting next to her on a recent flight took off her mask to sneeze.

So wearing masks on planes to limit the spread of Covid is clearly a hot-button issue.

As we return to the skies more than two years into the pandemic, what is the risk of catching Covid on a plane? And does it really matter where on the plane you are?

So many variables

It’s impossible to give a precise answer about your risk of catching Covid on a plane as there are so many variables.

For instance, not all countries and airlines require passengers to wear masks or be vaccinated.

Some countries and airlines require a negative COVID test within a certain timeframe before flying, others have scrapped that requirement entirely.

Then there are different rules that may apply if you’re flying domestically or internationally, or leaving or entering a country.

That’s before we start talking about the virus itself. We know more recent variants have emerged (Omicron and the sub-variant BA.2, for example), that are much more easily transmitted than the original virus or the Delta variant. We don’t know how transmissible future variants or sub-variants will be.

So we can only talk in general terms about the risk of catching Covid on a plane. All up, your risk is very low, but the measures airlines put in place help achieve that. You can also reduce your personal risk further in a number of ways.

Air flow and HEPA filters

Air flow is designed to largely travel vertically, from the ceiling to the floor, to reduce the potential spread of contaminated air through the plane.

The height of the seats acts as a partial barrier to air movement from rows in front and behind you.

Cabin air is also replaced every two to three minutes with a half-half mix of recycled and fresh air.

To see how this works in real life, researchers looked at how the virus spread on a long-haul flight when an infected person (the index case) sat in business class.

Twelve of 16 people who were infected on the plane sat within a few rows of this person; another was a flight attendant. This suggests limited spread of contaminated air through the rest of the plane.

Recycled air is also filtered through high-efficiency particulate air (or HEPA) filters. These remove more than 99% of viral particles, further reducing the risk of droplet or airborne transmission.

Masks

Well fitted masks or respirators (worn properly) can reduce your risk of contracting Covid on a flight. That’s why many airlines say wearing a mask is a condition of flying.

For example, modelling of several known transmission events on planes demonstrates an advantage if both the infected person and others around them wear masks.

Vaccination

Some countries, such as Australia, require entering travellers to be fully vaccinated. This lowers the risk of someone becoming sick with Covid.

Pre-flight Covid testing

Not all flights require a negative Covid test before boarding. For those that do, the time frame before a flight varies, as does the type of test required.

However, we know tests do not detect every single Covid case. A range of factors can influence test sensitivity (ability to detect Covid). These include the type and brand of test you take, whether you have symptoms, your age, and the viral variant.

You can also still test negative two days before a flight and catch Covid in the meantime.

Sanitisation

Airlines may do additional cleaning of high-touch areas, and overnight disinfection, to reduce the spread of Covid through touching contaminated surfaces.

However, the risk of transmission by this route is low compared to the risk of catching Covid through breathing in infectious droplets and aerosols.
When and where are you most at risk?

The closer you are to the infected person

Most transmission occurs within two to three rows of an infected person. If you sit next to someone who is coughing or has other symptoms you might ask to move seats if spare seats are available.

Distance yourself from others if you can, particularly when getting on and off the plane.

You might also avoid sitting close to the toilets as passengers will hang about in the aisles waiting to use them, particularly on long flights.

The longer the flight

The risk increases with long- versus short- or medium-haul flights. During long-haul flights passengers are also more likely to recline their seats. This somewhat reduces the protection upright seats provide in reducing air movement between rows.

If you or others are not wearing a mask or wearing it properly

You can breathe infectious particles in and out via your nose as well as your mouth, so don’t wear your mask under your chin or nose.

The risk also increases when everyone takes off their masks during food service. You might choose not to eat or drink on short flights to avoid this. Alternatively you might bring a snack to eat before food service begins, or eat after those around you.

If you contaminate your food or your face

You can catch Covid through touching your food or face with contaminated fingers. Sanitise your hands regularly and train yourself to not touch your face.

If you are in business class

Based on limited reports, the transmission risk appears higher in business class. This is possibly because of more interruptions to mask wearing due to greater service of food and drinks.

Thea van de Mortel is professor of nursing and deputy head of learning and teaching at the School of Nursing and Midwifery, Griffith University, Queensland.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Scientifically and emotively, we think every volcano has its own “personality”. However, we’ve discovered that volcanoes share behaviour traits – and this could form the basis for an eruption warning system.

Whakaari White Island, a picturesque volcanic island in the Bay of Plenty, was a tourist magnet, with its alien landscape and spectacular hydrothermal features. This idyll was shattered on 9 December 2019 when high-pressure steam and gas exploded, concentrating in a deadly surge of hot ash down its main access valley. Of the 47 guides and tourists present, 22 died while many others suffered horrific burns.

Since that tragedy, we have been studying past eruptions at Whakaari, and volcanoes like it, to identify the warning signs of an imminent eruption.

Deciphering volcanic language

Every volcano behaves differently: some have crater lakes while others are “dry”, they have diverse magmas and rise to different elevations. Despite these differences, we think volcanoes such as Whakaari, Ruapehu and Tongariro in New Zealand could be driven to eruption by common processes in the shallow sub-surface below their craters.

In our new research, we used machine learning to sift through 40 years of seismic data from the New Zealand volcanoes and three others around the world, listening for particular frequencies that track the depth where gas, magma or water are moving or building up.

We saw one pattern repeatedly in the days before all the known Whakaari eruptions over the past decade, and most Ruapehu and Tongariro ones. This pattern is a slow strengthening of a quantity called Displacement Seismic Amplitude Ratio (DSAR), which peaks a few days before each event.

DSAR is a ratio that compares the “activity” of fluids (gas, hot water, steam) at the volcano’s surface to those several hundred metres deep. When DSAR increases, surface fluids are quiet, but deep ones are still actively moving and circulating vigorously below ground.

This indicates a blockage or seal has formed, preventing gas escape. Like a pressure-cooker, if the gas can’t escape a volcano, it explodes.

What happened at Whakaari

About a month before the December 2019 eruption, deep gas started to rise into Whakaari’s hydrothermal system. This put pressure onto the groundwater, keeping it in a liquid state, even as it became “superheated”.

As this fluid circulates below the vent, it is registered as noise or “tremor” on seismometers. GNS Science noted this increased tremor and, on 18 November, raised Whakaari’s alert level to Volcanic Alert Level (VAL) 2, which is the highest level outside an eruption.

About a week later, Whakaari began to pulse. Pressure and tremor would build over about 24 hours, before discharging explosively at the bottom of the crater lake. This resulted in geysers and fountains, throwing mud and debris up to the height of a ten-storey building.

Crucially, these gas bursts were safety valves, easing the pressure in the system.

At the beginning of December, the gas bursts stopped and the surface became quiet. Rather than being cause for relief, we think this indicated a new and much more dangerous phase. A seal had formed, trapping the gas. The high DSAR shows that below the seal, the system was as noisy as ever, with pressure continuing to rise.

Between 9pm and midnight on 8 December 2019, there was a strong burst of seismic energy. This was likely fresh magmatic fluid arriving to ramp up the pressure on gas and water already trapped in the rock. It also began the process of explosive release, because it caused small cracks to form in the seal.

The growth of cracks began to accelerate, setting Whakaari on the path to a cascading system failure, as has been seen before in eruptions in 2012 and 2013. Once the weakness was widespread, the seal failed, disgorging the massive steam explosion at 2:11pm on 9 December.

Understanding Ruapehu

Mount Ruapehu is a 2800m stratovolcano in New Zealand’s central North Island.

It is also capped by a hydrothermal system and a warm crater lake (Te Wai a Moe). The temperature and level of its lake is known to vary in cycles, responding to changes in gas released into its base, local weather or the occasional formation of a gas seal.

Unfortunately, the lake is so large it hides the surface activity that is useful for diagnosing volcanoes like Whakaari.

This is where DSAR is so powerful. We have spotted the same pattern that reveals gas sealing at Whakaari numerous times at Ruapehu. We monitor DSAR at Ruapehu closely: over the past month it has increased dramatically.

We think this shows a new seal has formed, building pressure. This could end in an eruption similar to the 2006/07 cycle that generated destructive lahars (volcanic mud flows).

GNS Science has reported similar concerns in their decision to raise Ruapehu’s alert level to VAL 2.

This type of analysis is so new we have not had many chances to test how reliable the DSAR and other automated measures are for forecasting. However, the current high DSAR and lake heating have put all scientists on alert. History shows this state does not always lead to an eruption, but we must remain vigilant.

David Dempsey, Senior lecturer, University of Canterbury; Alberto Ardid, Post Doctoral Researcher, University of Canterbury, and Shane Cronin, Professor of Earth Sciences, University of Auckland.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Flattened by the pandemic and having survived on domestic consumption for two years, the tourism industry has a choice: try to revive the old ways, or develop a new model.

If tourism minister Stuart Nash has his way, there is no going back. “Tourism won’t return to the way it was,” he told Otago University’s Tourism Policy School recently, “it will be better”.

But how? The question is coming down to the various definitions of “value” – both the monetary and less tangible kinds.

When Nash addressed a tourism summit in late 2020, “high value” clearly meant “high spending”. New Zealand would “unashamedly” target the wealthy – the type of tourist who “flies business class or premium economy, hires a helicopter, does a tour around Franz Josef and then eats at a high-end restaurant”.

The minister also asked: “Do you think that we want to become a destination for those freedom campers and backpackers who don’t spend much and leave the high net worth individuals to other countries?”

There was immediate concern that such a policy would overlook the broader value of “lower-end” tourism: backpackers and other budget tourists might not spend as much per day, but they tend to travel for longer periods, bring dollars to remoter locations, and often work in understaffed industries like horticulture and hospitality.

At the same time, high-spending tourists hiring helicopters tend to place a high per-capita burden on the environment and contribute more to climate change. Clearly, what constitutes “high value” is up for debate.

From high value to high values

Now, however, the minister is defining the high-value tourist differently. They give back more than they take, appreciate those working in the tourism sector, are keen to learn about the people and places they are visiting, are environmentally aware and offset their carbon emissions.

This shift in thinking prompted one participant at the tourism policy school to suggest that instead of “high value” tourism, New Zealand needs to be talking about “high values” tourism.

The sentiment chimed with the policy school’s theme of “structural change for regenerative tourism”, and a general feeling that this will involve looking inward to certain core values that matter to the country.

Attendees – including industry leaders, academics, government officials and tourism business owners – supported the idea that “regenerative” in this context matches the important Māori values of kaitiakitanga, kotahitanga and manaakitanga, which should inform the future direction of tourism in Aotearoa.

Mana and manaakitanga

The implications of this approach were well articulated by Nadine ToeToe, director of Kohutapu Lodge, an award-winning tourism business in the central North Island. She proposed a new tourism model that advances manaakitanga (kindness and hospitality) to guests, while also enhancing the mana of their hosts, local communities and the surrounding environment.

With her business based in the area around Murupara, which is beset by historical injustices and downturns in the forestry industry, ToeToe described the potential of tourism to move beyond simple service industry conventions.

Rather, more authentic, culturally embedded experiences could be offered, based on building respectful relationships with the people and places visited. This would mean manaakitanga was reciprocal, benefiting both guests and local communities.

By being designed to enhance people, community and place, tourism would necessarily break from the old volume-driven model that was putting many natural environments under significant pressure prior to the pandemic.

Time for a reset

Of course, it is one thing to suggest that tourism respect the wairua (spirit) of the land, and quite another to put the legislative and regulatory frameworks around a pathway to sustainability.

To a degree this is beginning to happen already. For example, following concerns about a promised crackdown on freedom camping, the minister stepped back from banning vans that weren’t self-contained. However, proposed policy changes will go to select committee this year, with new rules to be rolled out gradually from next summer.

These should align with the minister’s view that “… at the heart of the new law will be greater respect for the environment and communities through a ‘right vehicle, right place’ approach” (with fines of up to $1,000 for offenders).

The challenge now is to broaden that vision beyond individual businesses, or pockets of concern such as freedom camping, to encompass the entire industry. Because there can be no better time than now for a values-based reset of New Zealand tourism.

Regina Scheyvens is Professor of Development Studies and Apisalome Movono is Senior Lecturer in Development Studies, both at Massey University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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After the shock news of YHA New Zealand’s closure, the operator’s former general manager of marketing and sales, Brian Westwood, writes the industry has an ‘Ace’ that is helping it through the crisis.

Brian Westwood

Despite the universe’s best efforts to destroy tourism in New Zealand, there are very good reasons why this industry – my industry – won’t be broken.

It’s been a tough few weeks, culminating with the announcement of YHA’s closure.

Within this maelstrom of closures, Covid chaos, political capers and a Covid strategy that is more reactive than Chernobyl, there has been clarity, ambition, drive and, dare I say it, genuine kindness from within our industry.

I had the privilege to be invited to participate in Go with Tourism’s Workforce Wānanga

My mind was well and truly blown by the collegiality, non-whining, future-focused conversations had by over 100 industry representatives. These individuals are as much competitors as they are allies. But they set that aside for the common good.

The maturity of the conversation, the pace and volume of the work and the insightful dialogue was something to behold. All driven by a desire to come out the other side better, stronger and without exception, focused on a successful future.

The other moment of clarity has been more personal.

On sharing the sad news of YHA’s demise and calling for help for our own staff to find work, the industry, my industry, rallied around and within hours put up multiple opportunities for our staff to investigate.

Take a moment to absorb that.

People I don’t know alongside many friends from all over New Zealand took the time to circle one of their own and wrap them in kindness, offering a practical helping hand. Without hesitation and with warmth. All during a time when it’s hard enough to look after yourself.

There is no other industry that has suffered more than tourism through this pandemic.

We were the first to lose our markets and we’ll be the last to get them back. Innovation, tenacity, and bloody-mindedness have seen many make it through so far. That’s not enough on its own as we head into 2022, but the ‘Ace’ we hold is our collective strength. Our shared wisdom, solutions focus and desire to win.

Our industry is a community in the strongest sense of the word. We compete, we argue, we laugh, and we play but most of all we genuinely care about each other, we understand the importance of the sum rather than the parts, and we unashamedly believe in our collective success.

This is why Tourism in New Zealand won’t be broken.

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The country’s events sector is the first to stop in lockdown and the last to re-start in recovery so it needs help to survive as losses mount, writes Ségolène de Fontenay, general manager of New Zealand Events Association. 

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Ségolène de Fontenay

55% of respondents to the New Zealand Event Association’s latest survey stated that the recent Covid-19 response has had a considerable financial impact on their organisation, whilst a further 23% stated that it had a moderate financial impact. The organisations that were willing to share their financial impact reported losses of up to $2m dollars each with an average loss of $167,000 per organisation, and total losses of $17.5m.

This represents just a small portion of the industry and considering the significant size of the event sector, the total financial impact will undoubtedly be many orders of magnitude higher. Whilst this reflects a big hit to the sector, should higher alert levels remain then the impact will only worsen as we move into spring and summer, traditionally the busiest time for events.

Due to the time of year, mainly business events, conferences, exhibitions and trade shows have been affected – many representing millions in lost commerce for other industries as well as the direct effects on the events sector and its supply chain including The Baby Show, Spring Gift & Homewares Fair, Auckland Boat Show and iconic leisure events like WOW, AIMS Games, Land Rover Horse of Year, sixteen performances of Mary Poppins, and the Auckland Marathon. In addition, events such as New Zealand Fashion Week, Motorhome Show, Home Shows, Armageddon Expo (just to name a few) have been put on hold until further alert levels are announced.

The events sector is likely experiencing the greatest consequences from the Covid-19 response of any industry, many events can realistically only take place at level 1 and the uncertainty is causing event professionals to leave the sector, ultimately the viability of the industry is now significantly jeopardised.

Long-term, the sector is already facing a skills shortage with many event professionals having already left the industry due to Covid-19 impacts. More are likely to follow. This shortage is the result of redundancies, the lack of access to international talent, and general uncertainly about the industry’s future. This is particularly concerning with recruitment and planning underway for significant major events such as the ICC Women’s Cricket World Cup 2022, Rugby World Cup 2021 (playing in 2022) and the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023, all of which have received Government investment.

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Demanding vaccine ‘passports’ from customers will raise hard questions about discrimination, inequality and coercion, argues Tim Dare, professor of philosophy at University of Auckland, and Justine Kingsbury, senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Waikato.

With Covid-19 causing extraordinarily intrusive and expensive lockdowns, vaccine “passports” or certificates are increasingly seen as key to getting out of them. Decision-makers and gatekeepers – from border guards to maître d’s – will have a means of knowing who can safely engage with others.

To that end, the New Zealand government aims to have one in place by year’s end. But vaccine passports have also prompted riots and protests overseas, and there are as yet unanswered questions about their use domestically.

A central concern is that they will cause or exacerbate inequality because access to a passport relies on access to vaccines, and access to vaccines has been unequal.

Internationally, citizens of some countries are more likely to have access to vaccines – and so too vaccine passports – than citizens of other countries. And within countries, some individuals and groups are more likely to have access to vaccines than others.

Furthermore, these inequalities track familiar and ethically troubling fault lines: New Zealand has struggled to lift Māori vaccination rates to match those of European New Zealanders, though Māori are more at risk.

And vaccine passports could compound existing inequalities, as those with them return to work and other activities while those without remain trapped.

Inequality and discrimination

But there are reasons to think these legitimate concerns don’t automatically mean vaccine passports are unethical.

Firstly, the need to contain Covid-19 justifies the significant restrictions of important liberties in lockdowns. But to the extent that vaccines work, that justification doesn’t apply to someone who has been vaccinated. The justification for curtailing liberties has gone (or at least, given the possibility of breakthrough cases, been considerably weakened), so for the vaccinated the curtailment should go too.

Secondly, distinguishing between people on the basis of their Covid immunity may be discrimination, but it’s not obvious it is unjustified discrimination.

Read more:
Vaccine passports are coming to Australia. How will they work and what will you need them for?

Whether someone is vaccinated or not is arguably legitimate grounds for discrimination. The unvaccinated (for whatever reason) pose a greater risk to others than the vaccinated. They are also more likely to suffer severe symptoms if they get Covid-19.

Thirdly, one reason to tolerate inequality is that sometimes it improves the position of the disadvantaged. We might tolerate doctors’ high incomes, for example, if the promise of a higher income led people to study medicine and we believed a good supply of doctors benefited the worst-off members of our community.

Vaccine passports might work the same way. They help get the economy going, so the government can support those still locked down. They’re also an incentive to vaccinate, and high vaccination rates are good for everyone — perhaps especially the unvaccinated.

An offer you can’t refuse

But the use of vaccine passports as incentives poses some real issues. How they are used is crucial. Under some proposals, vaccination passports are (like conventional passports) essentially another international travel document.

Increasingly, however, countries (including New Zealand potentially) are proposing their use to control access to a significant range of domestic activities, such as returning to work in person, dining out or going to concerts and sports events.

In this context, it’s clear some incentives can be coercive: they might be an offer you can’t refuse.

There are some people desperate to travel overseas, perhaps for good family reasons. But most of us can still decide whether the incentive of the IATA Travel Pass is enough to motivate us to travel.

Justified coercion?

Many people, though, will simply not be in a position to refuse the incentive of a domestic vaccine passport. Getting back to work and a pre-Covid life will not be a discretionary matter. For them, domestic vaccination passports are likely to be coercive.

For now at least, the government insists vaccination will not be mandatory. But effectively it will be for those who have no choice but to get a vaccine passport to work or have access to non-discretionary domestic activities.

And that coercion will not apply equally. There will be much greater pressure on those who are already socially disadvantaged and less able to make a genuine choice.

Coercion is sometimes justified, and perhaps the threat posed by Covid-19 warrants it. However, we should be wary of accepting kinds of coercion that are discriminatory and inegalitarian.

Read more:
Why we need to seriously reconsider COVID-19 vaccination passports

Governments need to be clear

So what should we do about vaccine passports and vaccine incentives?

We could restrict them to more discretionary activities, such as international travel, concerts and restaurants. That would be an offer anyone could refuse, especially the already disadvantaged.

But this use of passports might be insufficient incentive — too many people might refuse to get one. That’s a problem if we think trying to increase vaccination rates is justified.

So we think governments have a choice: they should address concerns about vaccine passports by avoiding uses that are coercive, discriminatory and inegalitarian. Alternatively, they should acknowledge their position that COVID-19 justifies coercion, and make vaccination mandatory.

The second option would be less discriminatory, and seems less likely to threaten trust and co-operation than the surreptitious and uneven compulsion provided by wide-ranging requirements for domestic vaccine passports.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Michael Lueck, professor of tourism at Auckland University of Technology, argues there’s good reason to be optimistic.

Michael Lueck

By this time next week flights between New Zealand and Australia will have been taking off and landing for three days. The quarantine-free trans-Tasman travel bubble, beginning 19 April, will finally be more than a promise.

For many people, especially those separated for so long from family, the open borders will mean more than the chance to take their first overseas holiday after the past year’s lockdowns and travel restrictions.

With more than half-a-million New Zealanders living in Australia, it is perhaps not surprising early flights were heavily booked, with Air New Zealand quickly selling out its Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne routes for the rest of April.

Far fewer Australians live across “the ditch”, but Australia has long been Aotearoa New Zealand’s largest inbound tourism market, accounting for approximately 1.5 million arrivals (about 40% of all international arrivals) before Covid-19 mothballed passports.

Australian visitors spend around NZ$2.7bn per annum in Aotearoa and (staying 11 days on average). In the other direction, New Zealanders accounted for 1.3 million arrivals to Australia in 2019, contributing AU$2.6bn to the Australian economy.

A bubble in time

The question now is, how much and how quickly will the open borders translate into any kind of tourism revival on either side of the Tasman? Clearly a single market cannot compensate for the lack of inbound travel from the rest of the world. But for tourism operators, something is obviously better than nothing.

Whether it will be enough for those most desperate is another matter. In a recent Tourism New Zealand survey, more than 900 tourism operators (half the sample) said they will have to close this year if conditions don’t improve.

Read more:
A quarantine-free trans-Tasman bubble opens on April 19, but ‘flyer beware’ remains the reality of pandemic travel

Of those, 13% reported they could only last three months, with the same number able to stay in business for three to six months. The bubble probably cannot save them all.

Australia’s tourism industry had already been hit by last summer’s bushfires when Covid-19 arrived. But healthy domestic tourism and a $A1.2bn government support package have provided a lifeline for many operators over the past year.

The winter factor

The timing may complicate things. The bubble coincides with New Zealand school holidays, but winter is also the low season when New Zealand tourism operators largely live off the profits from summer.

The exception is the ski industry, especially in the adventure tourism capital of Queenstown, which has weathered one winter without overseas visitors and is hoping for some relief.

Air New Zealand chief executive Greg Foran has said he anticipates strong winter demand from Australians visiting for ski holidays, especially from July to September. Assuming the bubble holds, this seems reasonable. Pre-pandemic, 71% of international skiers in Aotearoa New Zealand were Australian.

For Air New Zealand this also allows some expansion after a year of radical contraction. Some more aircraft in the airline’s wide-body fleet will be flying, and the company is bringing back furloughed crew grounded by the pandemic.

Both Qantas and Air New Zealand have said they expect to be quickly back at 85% of their pre-pandemic trans-Tasman capacity. In turn, this could boost rental car, campervan and motorhome businesses, given Australians are keen self-drive tourists in New Zealand. Any uptick here will flow on to smaller communities outside the main tourist centres.

New routes, new hope

Looking the other way, Australia has the advantage of its tropical and semi-tropical destinations, which Kiwis will find attractive as they enter their second Covid winter.

This will no doubt have been part of Qantas’s strategy in launching two new routes connecting Auckland with the Gold Coast’s Coolangatta airport (daily) and Cairns (initially for nine weeks).

But there is also a hope Kiwis will be tempted further south in Australia, with Air New Zealand recently announcing twice weekly non-stop flights between Auckland and Hobart (beginning on 22 April).

This could work both ways. Dr Anne Hardy, Associate Professor of Tourism and Society at the University of Tasmania, tells me New Zealand is also a popular holiday destination for Tasmanians, and she expects a good uptake of flights from the Hobart end as well.

Furthermore, in the medium to long term, these flights will also offer hassle-free one-stop connections to the US, bypassing crowded stopovers in Melbourne and Sydney and removing one more potential exposure zone while any risk of COVID-19 remains.

Read more:
A green tax on long-haul flights favours rich tourists. NZ needs a fairer strategy

A case for cautious optimism

This ongoing threat from unexpected community outbreaks in either country is the obvious caveat here. Even accounting for the roll out of vaccination programmes in Aotearoa and Australia, the mere thought of renewed quarantine requirements, reduced or cancelled flights and booked-out MIQ facilities will be enough to postpone many plans.

New Zealand has implemented a “traffic light system” to manage bubble flights. If the code went to orange or red, New Zealanders could be stranded for a time in Australia, with all the attendant expense of accommodation and re-booked flights.

Because the bubble has relieved some pressure on New Zealand’s managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) system, 500 beds have been allocated for such a contingency. For tourists, however, the big consideration will be travel insurance, which will not cover such Covid-related costs.

Overall, however, the bubble should have a positive impact on both sides of the Tasman. The optimistic outlook of Qantas (and its low-cost subsidiary Jetstar) and Air New Zealand seems realistic.

We can hope Kiwi ski breaks and Aussie tropical holidays will tide many businesses over to the busier summer season, by which time the bubble may have grown to include even more countries.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Peter Harris

Tourism measures its value by what tourists spend when they are on our shores. For many regions, this is a 2-3 night stand – 72 hours. Of course, minus sleeping, travelling and time spent doing Department of Conservation walks and other free activities.

But does this way of measuring the value of tourists do a disservice to our visitors and the industry that serves them? We want them to fall in love with our country but when we only measure their value by what they spend here, are we missing other ways visitors add value to our country?

Even the backpackers who don’t fit the ‘value over volume’ version of tourism can add significant value. If a frugal backpacker picks cherries for three weeks in the peak season their value to the New Zealand economy is worth far more than whatever they would have spent as a visitor. At the moment we don’t count their contribution because it’s not ‘spend’.

Beyond visitors, tourists have a life beyond travelling – they make consumer choices when they get home, and for those that fall head over heels with our place, they may choose to commit their futures here – by moving here to learn, work or invest.

The value from visitors beyond their spend can be as simple as them favouring New Zealand wine over the South African equivalent at their home supermarket, studying their PhD here rather than in Canada, or relocating to take a robotics engineer role with a New Zealand technology company. Their relationship with New Zealand can be enduring, and flourish, without even being here.

Without visitors, our export products would find it tougher to get traction in overseas markets, our universities would struggle to attract international students, and businesses in need of specialist talent wouldn’t be able to compete with other opportunities. And yet we don’t count this as value.

Part of the reason for this is that it is messy to measure. A tourist today may encourage their child to study here in five years’ time, or they may migrate ten years after they first visited.  Measuring the value of this long term relationship is complex.

Of course, these visitors make choices about what sort of relationship they have with us now.  Some of them will be loyal consumers of our products or will add value in other ways – but these relationships are built more by accident than by design. There are no incentives for the tourism industry to cross-sell beyond itself. Why would a boutique BnB promote skilled jobs or investment opportunities to visitors?

While it might seem irrelevant to be exploring this issue when international tourism isn’t possible, it is in fact the very time to be questioning how we measure value and whether we can deliberately foster a long term love affair.

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At a time when we’ve never had more access to information, it’s truly remarkable how little we know about tourism in New Zealand.

Even though tourism took centre stage with its contribution to New Zealand’s economy over the last decade, there is no doubt that the range of available tourism data is smaller than it was a few years ago and hasn’t kept pace with changes in the way data is available.

Chris Roberts

Our industry has also long suffered from a dearth of research, science and innovation (RSI). Tourism is largely unrecognised by the public sector science system and there is no mechanism to access funding from other sources, including from industry itself.

A fundamental review of the tourism data and research system is needed. This is why Tourism Industry Aotearoa has made ‘Knowledge’ one of the six priority areas for action from the incoming Government in TIA’s Tourism Election 2020 Action Plan.

We have also submitted in-depth Position Papers setting out our ideas on both Tourism Data and Tourism Research to the Tourism Futures Taskforce, for their consideration.

Increasingly, the traditional data collecting methods are becoming obsolete. For instance: manually completed departure cards have been eliminated and this will likely happen to the arrivals card at some point; airline lounge interviewing for the International Visitor Survey became too hard and expensive and has been superseded by online surveying (which has its own limitations); phone interviews for domestic travel couldn’t be sustained; the very manual Accommodation Survey became too expensive for Stats NZ to operate; and so on. This trend will undoubtedly continue.

This means that new and different data sources need to be used. There is a vast amount of administrative data to tap into, including electronic card transactions, phone use, GPS, industry data, and much more. The issue here is that making good use of this data is technically very difficult and therefore expensive. With its difficulty and complexity, using this data is not straightforward for all users.

Research on tourism is also a challenge. There is no structure, system or funding dedicated to the research needs of our industry.

There is no capacity for setting priorities, building research consortia and getting research programmes underway. There is no recognition of tourism within the government’s $1.4 billion RSI system. There is no structural mechanism to effectively engage the academic research capacity onto industry-relevant issues.

We can look enviously at primary sector industries like dairy, meat and wool, and wine, that all have strong research programmes.

The common thread is that these industries have a levy on the commodity produced that is then used for industry-good activities, whether advocacy, marketing or research. Often these levies are enacted in legislation, thereby providing an assured level of funding for the industries involved. Notably, these funds get vested with the industries themselves, and not a government agency. This enables the industry bodies to focus directly on the issues of most importance to their industry strategies, and to leverage other funding streams, whether public or private.

Furthermore, there is a complex set of funding arrangements and institutions to deliver research for these industries. For instance, there are Government Science and Innovation funds they can tap into, and Government-funded Crown Research Institutes (e.g. AgResearch, Plant and Food, forestry’s Scion) and universities that have the capability to conduct research programmes.

In late 2019, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment convened, on behalf of the minister of tourism, the Tourism Information and Data Hui. Attended by 80 people from industry, government and research communities, the Hui examined information needs, opportunities for development and what a collaborative data system should look like.

The Hui was a success and there was a commitment to make real progress. The Covid-19 pandemic inevitably led to a delay in activating the agreed actions. But we must get moving. The revival and revitalisation of tourism will require serious improvements to be made to the tourism data system.

A collaborative approach by the public and private sectors is needed to address priorities for tourism data and research. We are calling on the incoming Government to allocate funds from the International Visitor Conservation and Tourism Levy to support this work. Tourism also needs to have better access to the public sector science and research system.

TIA is firmly committed to improving the tourism data and research system, because having the right knowledge available for those who need it, is fundamental to building a sustainable tourism industry.

This piece was originally posted on LinkedIn and republished with permission.

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Aotea New Zealand director Richard Hanson calls on the Government to outline its conditions for vaccine-based travel so operators can plan for the recovery of New Zealand tourism.

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Richard Hanson

There has been growing optimism in international media regarding the potential approval of vaccines for Covid 19. This is the foundation that will be required to rebuild the world’s tourism industry.

The approval of vaccines is a key marker for any tourism business that is calibrating its hibernation and recovery strategy on the wide-scale availability of international travellers.

But the approval of a vaccine is not a finish line. It is the call to the tourism industry to arrange its vehicles on the starting grid and await the instruction to “start your engines”.

In fact, the approval of vaccines does not necessarily translate into availability. In turn, availability does not necessarily mean the immediate normalisation of travel.

In recent months, limited use approvals have been granted for vaccines in China and Russia. Traditional large scale trials are currently underway on a range of other vaccine candidates. The first results from these trials are anticipated to be available by the end of the year. Announcements of results ahead of the US election is also a timetable that is considered viable by some optimistic commentators.

There are a number of complicated steps between the announcement of a viable vaccine and the reopening of New Zealand’s borders. Consideration of these steps and the Government’s approach will have a dramatic impact on the tourism industry.

Here are the things we cannot control:

• Production timeframe of vaccine
• Timetable to administer vaccines within each community
• Proportion of population immunised
• Dosage Requirement (one dose or two doses for each person)
• Timeframe for development of immunity (expected to be at least one month)
• Which countries have access to vaccines

So, questions for New Zealand:

• If a visitor to New Zealand has been vaccinated, which vaccines would be approved?
• If a visitor to New Zealand has been vaccinated, how is this verified?
• When would vaccinated New Zealanders be allowed to travel offshore and return without isolation?
• Should the New Zealand population be fully vaccinated prior to opening borders for international travel?

The recovery of international travel will take a period of marketing and scheduling of air capacity. During this time, local businesses will be activating their restart plans and hiring staff.

As vaccines are deployed within New Zealand and overseas countries, there will be period before international travel resumes. This will be a valuable time during which businesses can use to end hibernation and implement their recovery plans.

A well-communicated plan from the Government, outlining the preconditions required for vaccine-based travel, would be a valuable tool in businesses planning for the recovery of tourism in New Zealand.

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For a good summary of worldwide vaccine progress: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/coronavirus-vaccine-tracker.html

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University of South Australia senior lecturer in tourism management and former University of Otago academic, Dr Freya Higgins-Desbiolles, argues we cannot return to the type of hyper-development that tourism suffered from pre-Covid.

Dr Freya Higgins-Desbiolles

Right at the centre of the New Zealand Tourism Futures Taskforce are the ideas of responsible and sustainable tourism with values, communities, and people. But what are the ideas of change?

To start with, discussing Covid-19, historian Yuval Noah Harari claimed: “This storm will pass. But the choices we make now could change our lives for years to come”.

As a tourism researcher, I have been interested in how Covid-19 might mark a pivotal moment in the future of tourism. In response to the impacts of the crisis, will we embark on even more hyper forms of tourism development or will we become more thoughtful and discerning in our tourism choices?

It is hard to do such thinking when our tourism and hospitality industries have been hammered. All around the world, borders have been shut, airlines grounded and venues closed. As a result, the Covid-19 pandemic crisis has been devastating in its impacts on travel and tourism, as well as the hospitality, arts and events affiliated sectors.

The World Tourism Organization has estimated: up to an 80% decline in international tourism in 2020; a possible US$1.2tr loss in tourism export revenues; and a risk to up to 120 million direct tourism jobs. Even in places where the pandemic has been well-managed, the threat of second waves looms over us until we find more long-term answers through an effective vaccination programme.

In such circumstances, it would seem logical we would want a return to normal as soon as possible. In terms of tourism, Covid-19 has shown us just how dependent our economies and societies are on tourism and these affiliated sectors. But has this been a good thing?

Before Covid-19 struck, reports came from around the world that suggested that tourism was bursting at the seams.

Overtourism hit tourism destinations as diverse as Barcelona, Venice, Reykjavik, Queenstown, Machu Picchu and Byron Bay. This phenomenon occurs when tourism growth dynamics result in the overshoot of the destination’s carrying capacity (in both physical and psychological terms). This resulted in community protests, calls to stop some forms of tourism (e.g. cruises and daytrippers), proposals to radically re-regulate it and actual closures of places such as Boracay, Philippines and Maya Bay, Thailand.

In New Zealand, overtourism manifested in tensions over freedom-camping, dangerous driving, over-crowding and tourism-induced pressures on living costs.

The causes of overtourism varied according to the destination. The disruptive agents of the sharing economy, like Airbnb, were blamed for bringing more tourists into the heart of communities instead of just tourist sites. Cheap travel and package holidays enabled more people to take short city breaks and cruises, particularly in Europe.

Social media played a role in popularising less-visited places, which went from being off-the-grid to “must-see” destinations overnight. The shifting focus of governmental tourism agencies saw them become almost exclusively marketing-focused with a singular goal of growing tourism.

With Covid-19, we have transitioned from overtourism, to practically no tourism. We could learn some lessons from these recent events and consider how to socialise tourism so that we transform it into appropriate tourism. By socialising tourism, I mean placing tourism in the context of the society in which it occurs and harnessing it for the empowerment and wellbeing of local communities.

There are examples of socialising tourism and tourists that we could already draw on to assist our thinking.

Firstly, we might start with Indigenous protocols and ceremonies which have existed for millennia to socialise visitors on how to respectfully visit the home of another people. New Zealand has been wayfinding in this by respectfully engaging Māori values in its approaches to tourism, most recently in the Tiaki Promise – Care for New Zealand campaign.

Other examples to consider:

• The Localhood strategy of Copenhagen which proclaimed “we wish to co-create… a future destination where human relations are the focal point, where the differentiation between destination and home of locals is one and the same. A destination, where locals and visitors not only co-exist, but interact around shared experiences of localhood”;
• In 2019, Amsterdam initiated an Untourism campaign which featured “marry a local for the day” with the aim of harnessing tourists for positive change-making in the city;
• Like the Tiaki Promise, Palau has sought to transform visitors into custodians and caretakers through the Palau Pledge visa stamp;
• Creative disruptions such as the Fairbnb cooperative and Makeyourtripbetter.com which make it possible for tourism to once again feature a direct connection between host and guest.

In our current situation, overtourism may seem like a distant memory and a problem that we wish we now had. But we shouldn’t forget the signs that tourism was in deep trouble pre-Covid.

With Covid, we were reminded just how important our community connections and our social supports are to our continued prosperity and well-being. Such reinvigoration of the social invites us to imagine the possibilities for socialising tourism. Such initiatives would place the local community at the centre of the tourism phenomenon and establish more solid foundations for a sustainable future.

If you would like to know more, please join me on 10 September as I will participating in a debate about the rethinking of tourism and its future organised by Victoria University of Wellington. See here for further details.

Further reading:

Socialising tourism for social and ecological justice
The end of global travel as we know it
Rethinking tourism so the locals actually benefit

Twitter: @freyahd

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José Filipe Torres, founder and chief executive of nation branding specialists Bloom Consulting, argues a country’s digital identity cannot be ignored if it wants to attract visitors.

José Filipe Torres

Countries, regions and cities already know they need to strategically manage their brand—not only for reputation management, but also for trade, investment, talent and, of course, attracting tourists.

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Ngahiwi Tomoana

Tēnā koutou katoa e te iwi,

I’ve been recently appointed to the minister of tourism, Kelvin Davis’s taskforce. Mere and I have been hosting people here in Pakipaki for over 30 years, groups of ten to 500 at a time, using the history of Heretaunga, Pakipaki, and Te Hauke, to tell our stories, and finishing it with a hāngi and a haka.

The last twenty years have seen the tourism industry depart from hāngi-haka, and go more towards a white-knuckle fever, bungy jumping, white-water jet boats and rafting, skiing, and mountain climbing, as well as fishing and hunting. This all came to a stop during Covid and tourism lost 90% of its revenue. So, I’ve been asked to look at things as an iwi leader, through a cultural lens, and reset the tourism agenda.

There are five issues that immediately arise for me:

The first one is that you cannot look for an answer in tourism within the tourism industry itself, it must come from the wider community and broader government agencies including regional and local councils as well as iwi and hapu.

Secondly, environmental tourism around the world can also be described as environmental vandalism. With Mount Everest, for example, turning from white to yellow snow due to all of the pollution and urine, or the game parks of Africa becoming slaughter houses for elephants, rhinoceros, and other mega species. With that in mind, and knowing that New Zealand’s infrastructure wasn’t able to cope with the onslaught of tourists, who wanted to come to a safe but distant land, we have the perfect opportunity to reset.

Thirdly, we have a whakataukī, ‘Ahakoa nia nia he pounamu’ meaning, ‘Although it is small and diminutive, it has the quality and value of a pounamu.’ It is this type of metaphor that I will use to describe our future in tourism – high value, with low impact. The high value is in our isolation, our unique cultural texture, and our innovative thinking. There’s also a quote from Rudyard Kipling, who was a British-Indian philosopher, and writer. When he visited the New Zealand in the early 1900’s described Aotearoa as the “loveliest, loneliest, land apart” and we have certainly realised this during Covid, and during lockdown, where Papatūānuku started healing herself rapidly as there were no cars on the road, the air was clear, there were no storm run-offs into creeks because businesses were closed, and our creeks, swamps, lagoons, and rivers became clear. The birdsong was at its fullest every day, all day as there was no din from traffic, industry, airplanes, or trains, and people were allowed to stay home in their sanctuary of their own backyards. The lesson for tourism is how do we maintain this type of healing for our lands and environment and still reap the loveliest-loneliest dollar out of tourists.

Fourthly, the Māori tourism sector has been undervalued, underfunded, and never understood by New Zealanders and therefore, does not feature in New Zealand tourism landscape as it should.

Lastly, there is another sector in tourism that might happen on a spontaneous, or ad hoc basis, but I think needs to be developed. I call it ‘mahi ra tahi’, which literally means ‘work for a day’, and would see visitors choose to work for a day in many vocations such as farming, fishing, freezing works, orchards, vineyards, or even in offices where they work with the people that are hosting them to get a hands-on experience of a day in the life of a kiwi.

This opens up many challenges, but many more opportunities, for example every farm becomes a potential tourist attraction, every forest, every freezing works, every footwear or furniture manufacturer, or working on a marae or in a community organisation. This is a low impact, high value proposition, because we already have the infrastructure here and it goes alongside a ‘food tourism’ chain where visitors work and process our tasty food products, not just dine out on them.

I would like to call a tourism symposium in our region to support the taskforce work. Ngāi Tahu have already signalled that they would like me to call a tourism symposium there in the next two months. I will be relying a lot on the current Māori tourism sector but also reaching out beyond into the wider community. Although this work may have a small window, I hope it will be of great value. Ahakoa nia nia he pounamu.

The authentic Māori stories that are told at every hui, and every tangi, on every marae are the untapped wealth of our new tourism. Some of the history and whakapapa pertaining to each marae (and there are nearly 700 throughout the country), are so fantastic and so unbelievable and you can never find them in any fiction, or any novel. The story telling around marae, around hangi fires, and during family wānanga, are only scratching the surface of the cultural wealth this country has to offer to the world.

But how do these stories and histories see the light of day if they are still mainly orally communicated? This is where we have to reach outside the tourism blinkers to bring in the Ministry of Education, Callaghan Innovation, Ministry for the Environment, and bring these stories to the tablets and computers of our students, in whatever learning environment they are taking part in.

This means recording, writing, videoing, digitalising, and then embedding these stories into our national curriculum so instead of tourist guides telling the story, we have a tourism sector of five million people telling our stories, using tangata whenua and mana whenua from each marae and from each region as their own story tellers.

We had a country of five million over lockdown, so why not start using the term ‘five-million operators.’ Operators who become qualified in Māori history and again our whānau they become experts in telling those stories. From those stories we become the operators, because as Māori, and as kaitiaki of these stories we also have kaitiakitanga over our land, our environment, our marae, and the people who come to visit us. Our manaaki, and kaitiaki over our whenua, and our people resident here also extends to visitors, and we always ensure the balance is kept between commercial and cultural imperatives. Telling our stories is a prerequisite for our tourism industry to become super-successful.

Secondly, using WAI 262 and Ko Aotearoa Tēnei Waitangi Tribunal Report as a handrail, we then explore the diversity of our country using a Māori lens.

Looking at all property and whakapapa of all plants, looking alongside DOC at not just the survival but the regeneration and repopulation of these native flora and fauna to be used as a tourist tool and an attraction to enhance our people in places, rather than degrade them. Naturally, their local mana whenua and tangata whenua will have kaitiaki over these species, and our tourist manuhiri. But the power must be shared, in order to get an effective tourist transformation.

In addition to the development of resources and relationships with the resource kaitiaki, we must also upgrade our marae to become tourism hubs or economic hubs – at the moment they are just used as cultural hubs which means that Regional Development Ministry and the Civil Defence Ministry must resource marae to become civil defence centres, campervan centres, and technology centres to tell our stories, to host people, as well as provide civil defence cover. That means fibre-optic-ing up our remote marae, putting infrastructure in, to ensure they can cope with visitor numbers that will surely rise, with the resources to be able to tell their stories, but also get cover for any civic and regional emergences. The tourism issues that need to be addresses are much wider than the tourism sector.

Furthermore, through Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment and others, Māori communities must be developed for small business entities, and medium business entities to be able to tell these regional stories because we already live in these areas, and we aren’t going to leave in a hurry.

Hangi, haka, and hongi still has a resonance with tourists, but it will be better done on a local scale than on a mass scale, so there is less impact on the infrastructure required to host hoards, busloads, and planeloads on mass in our country, but rather cater for smaller touring groups, and families at any one time.

In summary, the new Aotearoa, New Zealand tourism trails from a Māori lens would activate Māori history and story-telling, using all the means at our disposal, getting New Zealand familiar with them over the next 2-3 years as our borders remain closed, and then launching this tourism family of five million that would not only be domesticised but can go and tell their stories to the world through our export industries, and our highly mobile international population who at the moment are all coming home to roost, but will surely reach out to far flung places of the world once the Covid panic is over, or once a vaccine is found. In the meantime, we have 1-3 years to reset the tourism agenda, and culture is the key.

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Zac Watson

Over the past decade, New Zealand has seen its tourism sector go from strength to strength through hard work, creativity and brilliant leadership from our key industry professionals and bodies. In the past two to three years, tourism and the visitor economy was also starting to become a viable, aspirational career path for young people. It became much more than the historical reputation of a “holiday or part-time job” while they look for something in a more long term sustainable line of work. The stigma around low wages, lack of career development opportunities and an educational pathway that didn’t meet the demand were all hurdles that industry, the education sector, and the public sector were starting to make enormous inroads with.

It took not much more than two months for Covid-19 to sweep through New Zealand, heavily impacting our tourism sector, and putting a stop to these success stories. The feeling of unease within tourism is still very much present today, and more so the fear of what lies ahead. It’s been devastating to watch many of our most successful tourism businesses have to totally reshape their strategy and make the painful decision to reduce their team in an attempt to simply survive. This has created immense unease for both business and employees. There are so many unknowns still in place around border dates, wage subsidies, central government targeted funding and overarching risk that Kiwi’s will not partake in the domestic tourism offering enough to save many internationally focused tourism businesses.

Eight years ago, facilitated by the Tourism Export Council of New Zealand (TECNZ), a group of forward thinking, diverse young tourism industry leaders formed YoungTEC. A sub-association to represent the interests of those industry professionals under the age of 36, employed in tourism to offer professional development and networking opportunities.

Today, this group has over 250 members, offers numerous free and paid calendar events, its own awards to recognise the achievements of our young people, and a nationally renowned Professional Development Program (PDP). Unfortunately, to the fault of no one, many of our members have been heavily impacted from a change in circumstances including redundancies, company hibernation or restructures.

For YoungTEC, Covid-19 has brought about many of the same realities that most of our businesses within tourism are facing. Rapid budget cuts, a new way of working, and most of all a forced new way of thinking. We have “pivoted” from initially a key outcome being professional development, to being more focussed around connection and communication. Ensuring all members whether they are still employed or not, have a voice, a sound board and a pathway back into the industry. We have changed the YoungTEC calendar to include low cost, mostly free events utilising online platforms for delivery, and have cancelled or postponed what is required. We are also continuing to look at ways to add value to all our members, and no matter their circumstances, ensuring that ease of connection to like-minded industry professionals continues.

A key annual event is our workshop day, in partnership with The Icehouse and the Hospitality Training Trust. It is focused on professional development in the leadership and management space. This year we have reworked the content, changed the price point, and focused on resilience to stay relevant to the current challenging environment we operate in. The interactive workshop will include frameworks and tools to help our young leaders find opportunities to drive the recovery journey within their own team or company. Registrations for ‘Opportunity in Uncertainty’ open at 10:00am today, Monday 27 July, and we are very excited and extremely grateful to our partners who have made this a reality in 2020.

When you stop and think about what our visitor industry has been through in the past two years alone it is baffling, let alone the last two decades. We have watched with pride as the tourism industry has slowly but surely made its way to the top of New Zealand’s export earning industries. It is now becoming apparent though as each day passes, that with school holidays and long weekends now behind us and a wage subsidy scheme that is nearing its end, that our industry is incredibly anxious for what comes next.

Although the uncertainty is not going away, tourism has earnt the right to get, and desperately needs significant support from local and central government on a targeted and practical approach to move forward for our incredible businesses, but also our talented passionate people. All of whom truly give everything to ensuring the best visitor experience is had by all throughout our beautiful nation of Aotearoa New Zealand.

Many of our young people have been forced to reconsider their career in tourism due to Covid-19. It is important that we make an effort to retain young talent within the tourism industry. Don’t underestimate their ability to help you find creative and innovative ways to rebuild your business and our industry. YoungTEC remains committed to developing these talented leaders and keeping them connected to the industry and each other to ensure we work together to build a better future.

We have an opportunity like never before, to emerge a stronger, more connected, more purposeful industry, and with the help of the next generation of tourism leaders, we will come out better than ever.

The ‘Opportunity in uncertainty’ event will be held on 23 September at The Icehouse, Auckland, and registrations open today.

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University of Otago professor of tourism James Higham argues that the era of unsustainable long-haul short-stay tourism is coming to an end, making way for regional travel bubbles, which will create a high-value, low-leakage and low-emissions future.

Professor James Higham

Unprecedented border closures and the domestic lockdown have paralysed New Zealand’s $40.9bn a year tourism industry. In the process, the vulnerability of the sector to external shocks and the tenuous nature of tourism employment have been exposed.

While New Zealand’s handling of the pandemic has been hailed as a global masterclass, and the prospect of travel bubbles promoted as a way to restart the tourism economy and save jobs, it is clear there is no quick fix.

The inherent dangers of reinfection from travel to and from countries with uncontrolled community transition, and the challenge of protecting New Zealand’s borders, mean international tourism is grounded for the time being.

Nevertheless, planning for recovery is underway. The United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) wants to restore confidence and restart tourism without delay. The European Union recently opened its borders to travellers from certain countries, including New Zealand.

But the proposed trans-Tasman and Pacific bubbles will likely be among the first safe international travel zones in the world.

A Tasman-Pacific bubble is good for the planet

The economic benefits are obvious. A recent study using UNWTO data identified Australian tourists, who spend on average $7490 on holidays, as the top spending tourists in the world. Of the 3.8 million international tourists who visited New Zealand in 2018, nearly 40% were from Australia.

By the end of 2019, Australian tourists had spent $2.5bn in the New Zealand economy. Of course, that figure is offset by the $1.6bn spent by Kiwis visiting Australia in 2019.

Simply wishing for a return to normal, however, is not enough. The tourism rebuild must negotiate a delicate balance between immediate recovery and long term sustainability. A new steady-state equilibrium that generates employment and income while driving down tourism carbon emissions is required.

Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic it was widely recognised that the global tourism system is economically and environmentally flawed. Our research has highlighted three main structural failures:

1. low value (caused by growth in arrivals combined with declining spending)
2. economic “leakage” (due to outbound tourism and the concentration of profit flowing to a few global players)
3. high carbon emissions (from high-carbon transport dependence, increasing distance of travel and falling average length of stay).

Reducing travel distances is key

In the case of a geographically distant destination like New Zealand, there is no ignoring the last of those problems, as a report by the New Zealand Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment highlighted in late 2019.

The fact is, high carbon emissions are embedded in New Zealand’s tourism GDP. In the rebuild we must commit to measuring the carbon footprint of tourism, and actively manage forms of tourism that come with a disproportionately high carbon cost.

In practice, this will mean more tourism from the regional medium-haul markets that fall within the proposed Australia-New Zealand-Pacific travel bubble. Increasing reliance on Australian states rather than long-haul markets will result in a dramatic reduction in carbon emissions per dollar of tourism GDP.

Research published in 2010 showed that while Australian tourists made up 37% of international visitors to New Zealand they were responsible for 13% of air travel emissions. By contrast, visitors from Europe made up 18% of total visitors but 43% of emissions.

Fewer long haul arrivals, more Australian tourists, more domestic tourism and less outbound travel will dramatically reduce tourism carbon emissions.

Covid-19 has already kickstarted the domestic part of this equation. New Zealand hasn’t targeted local tourists since 1984’s iconic “Don’t leave town till you’ve seen the country” campaign. But the regions are now competing for the roughly 60% of all tourist dollars that New Zealanders spend in their own country each year.

The closure of international borders has also, for now, stopped the significant economic drain caused by outbound travel. In 2019, Kiwis spent nearly $5bn travelling overseas.

Time to stop marketing long-haul tourism

Most trade (including tourism exports) comes from markets closest to us. It is much cheaper to trade with neighbours, and it is far more sustainable to have tourists arrive from closer rather than distant countries.

New tourism models have to be found that can reduce the sector’s emissions while maintaining as much as possible its income and employment benefits.

Tourism carbon analysis is likely to point towards the growing importance of long-stay visitors, such as international students, who already provide 23% of total international tourist spending in New Zealand.

Equally, it will be necessary to “de-market” and reduce long-haul, high-carbon, short-duration, and low economic yield tourist arrivals. Passengers who arrive on enormous carbon intensive cruise ships – 9% of visitors but only 3% of tourism earnings – fall firmly into the least desirable category.

An Australia-New Zealand-Pacific travel bubble clearly fits the new model. The tourism rebuild must involve all measures being taken to create a high-value, low-leakage and low-emissions tourism future.

This column was originally published in The Conversation.

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As New Zealand travel writers throw themselves with gusto into rebuilding domestic tourism, Sarah Bennett proposes a ban on ‘secret beaches’, ‘hidden gems’ and other ‘underrated’ places in favour of a more inclusive and strategic approach.

At last year’s TRENZ I met a fellow media delegate about to embark on a whirlwind tour around a relatively low-profile region for a travel splash in a major UK daily. She seemed bewildered at my suggestion that she check in with the locals about that exposure first.

Call me old school. My first travel-writing hero was Tony Wheeler. Working in Lonely Planet’s UK office back in the day, I travelled with Tony to bookstores where he’d deliver scintillating talks. Like the audience, I hung off every word. When the mic was off, however, Tony was more of a listener. And that felt like a bit of a clue.

A few years later when my partner Lee and I started writing for Lonely Planet, we discovered that listening was a big part of the gig. A chinwag here, a nod and a wink there. RTO, iSITE, DOC staff, all sorts of operators, the folks down the pub. Getting the lay of the land seemed vital if you wanted to create a happy marriage between host and visitor.

Twenty years of travel writing has taught us that not everyone wants us to spill the beans on their secret slice of paradise. The natural environment, too, has shown resistance, resulting in our deliberate omission of secret penguin colonies, seal-pup pools and pristine springs. Some places just aren’t for us.

Lonely Planet’s editors proved well attuned to the negative effects of guidebook readers on the places that they visited. A few years ago, authors were asked to justify the inclusion of any marine wildlife tour. It felt ridiculous to have to defend Whale Watch in light of Blackfish, but I like to think the marine life was glad we had to.

On hearing news that Lonely Planet is closing offices, casting authors and staff adrift, I can’t help feeling even more nostalgic for the days when print was king and the glacially slow publishing process allowed time for rigorous research and consideration of downstream effects.

Travel writing now lands on a dime. Pre-Covid-19, old-school guidebooks and in-depth features had been increasingly displaced by hastily curated and crowd-sourced content with a palpable sense of self. Mainstream media channels were flush with airbrushed accounts of famil trips with enormous carbon counts and more than a hint of colonisation.

For all the benefits we’ve seen it bring – at its most obvious in small New Zealand towns and rural areas – the tourism industry has proven unsustainably extractive. And in this, travel media have appeared increasingly complicit, selling a dream that seems less concerned about sustainability and more about clicks and the commercial imperatives they serve.

Well, it’s a whole new world now, and travel writing has changed overnight.

As we seek ways to help rebuild domestic tourism and the nation in turn, let’s get back to grassroots, listen to the locals, and gain deeper insights into the places we go. Then maybe we’ve got a chance to regenerate not only the industry but the very planet itself.

Sarah Bennett & Lee Slater are travel communicators and publishers specialising in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

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The impact of Covid-19 on New Zealand’s international education sector can hardly be overstated. Almost overnight, the global travel ban thwarted the plans of thousands of international students. Lecture theatres, halls of residence and private accommodations stood empty.

By the end of April 2020, overseas enrolments stood at 17,570 students – about half the total number during the same period in 2018.

Dr Rahul Sen

However, given the closed borders and early lockdown, it’s heartening that universities have continued to receive overseas inquiries and enrolments for next year.

The fact students still want to study in New Zealand can be attributed to two things.

First, despite the recent border control failure, New Zealand is in a singular position as the first OECD country in the world to eliminate Covid-19. Praise from the media has been global and glowing, which prospective students will have noticed.

Second, New Zealand universities have acted swiftly to ensure current international students here and abroad can continue their studies with minimal disruption.

Both these aspects will play a crucial role in re-establishing New Zealand as a preferred destination as the economy recovers. Targeting potential student groups and marketing New Zealand as a quality education centre will be key to this.

It will need to be a priority. Already two Australian universities, in partnership with state and federal governments, are trialling direct charter flights for international students in anticipation of re-opened borders.

We already have a competitive edge

New Zealand has positioned itself well as a leading international education destination over the past two decades.

Our global reputation as a clean, green and welcoming place to study translates into an international education sector estimated to be worth $5.1bn. That makes it the fourth-largest export earner and the second-largest services export sector. It contributes around 1.5% of New Zealand’s GDP.

Swati Nagar

International students make direct and indirect contributions to the economy. They are obviously a vital source of revenue for the New Zealand education sector, but they also help to redress critical skill shortages in the labour market.

In 2019, for example, international students filled about 47,000 jobs. They add value by gaining qualifications in critical areas like health care and science and technology. And they contribute to the broader economy by spending on tourism and hospitality.

On average, each international student has an economic value of close to $40,000 per year.

If New Zealand’s elimination strategy succeeds, it will remain an attractive destination for international students – particularly if other leading destinations – namely the US, UK and EU – struggle to contain the pandemic.

Out of crisis comes opportunity

New Zealand’s victory over the virus will mean a win for New Zealand universities. The primary aim of marketing strategies should now be to further emphasise New Zealand as a safe, internationally competitive and quality destination to pursue tertiary study.

As the UK and US continue to struggle with the Covid-19 crisis, Australia and New Zealand are poised to become preferred destinations for international education. This presents New Zealand universities with a unique opportunity to target students who might previously have preferred to study in those bigger markets.

Universities can also capitalise on support from local councils. They are backing calls to let international students return, such as the recent proposal from Auckland Council and the wider education sector.

New Zealand universities should also aim to develop new partnerships with leading international institutions within our key export markets. The recently established New Zealand Centre at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and the University of Auckland China learning centres are examples of such alliances.

The latter model – on-campus learning for international students in China while they wait for borders to open – should be explored by other players in this sector. Given that most New Zealand universities have limited enrolments from Southeast Asia, a similar approach with leading academic institutions in the region could tap new markets.

The government’s role could be vital

As the world grapples with containing Covid-19, the move to open our borders for international students presents two main challenges: safety and cost.

New arrivals will have to quarantine in regulated facilities and be tested regularly for an agreed period. This will inevitably mean extra costs for students. Many of them will not be able to afford it.

One possible solution is that New Zealand universities, together with the government, offer financial packages for deserving international students. This would be justified as critical for maintaining our competitiveness in an increasingly knowledge-based global economy.

Business as usual is no longer an option. Only by creatively adapting to the new realities of a post-Covid world will the New Zealand brand grow again and our universities become a preferred destination for international education.

This column was originally published in The Conversation.

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