Dramatic changes in purpose of visits to New Zealand

The following graph indexes overseas visitor growth to New Zealand by purpose back to the year ended March 2004.

What it clearly shows is that the weakening growth in overall visitor numbers to New Zealand contains within it three interesting trends:

• Strong growth in visiting friends and family (VFR), perhaps connected with related long-term migration
• A lack of growth and a cyclical pattern in holiday visitor numbers
• A collapse in business visitor numbers since 2007

The data source for this graph is the entry cards visitors fill in when passing across the New Zealand border. These are processed by Statistics NZ.