Analysis of tourist consumption, expenditure and prices for key international visitor segments: technical report

Abstract

The Tourism & Oil project is undertaken against the backdrop of highly volatile oil prices, especially in the last 6 months, and a major global financial crisis that undoubtedly affects tourist arrivals to New Zealand. Increasing our understanding of tourism’s responses to global oil prices and tourists’ price sensitivity more generally is therefore timely.

Based on data from the International Visitor Survey we were able to provide a time series (10 years) of typical consumption bundles for 18 visitor segments. These bundles describe tourists’ consumption of accommodation, air transport, transport, fuel, and other tourism products. We also produced a Tourism Price Index for each of these visitor segments and observed how the price of tourism changed over the last 10 years, both in New Zealand dollars and tourists’ own currency. A key finding is that the price of tourism has increased above inflation rates (with variations across the segments), and that the effect of exchange rate fluctuations has dominated the overall impact on price over time. Overall, our research suggests that oil price volatility has had a limited effect on tourist demand and consumption to date. Due to severe data limitations we were unable to develop robust price elasticities, but an improved data set might make such analysis possible in the future. We are also exploring options for an in-depth price sensitivity analysis in relation to tourists’ transport behaviour.