China buoys New Zealand tourism

WELLINGTON - A surge in the number of visitors from China nudged up the total number of overseas visitors to New Zealand by under 1 percent last month as numbers dropped from traditional source countries such as the United Kingdom and Australia, the government statistics agency announced Friday.

Visitors from China were up by 4,400 from May last year, while visitors from the United Kingdom were down 1,400 and from Australia down 2,000, according to Statistics New Zealand.

"The number of visitors from China (12,900) was the highest ever from that country for a May month," population statistics manager Andrea Blackburn said in a statement.

"This is a continuation of a trend showing increases in visitors from China."

In the year ending May, 2.61 million visitors arrived in New Zealand, up 4 percent from 2011, with the largest increases from China, Australia, France and Malaysia. The largest decrease was in visitors from Japan.

Kevin Bowler, chief executive of government tourism agency Tourism New Zealand, said the country needed to maintain the upward momentum in drawing visitors.

"We first saw this number of overseas visitors in December 2011, when arrivals topped 2.6 million for the first time. Seeing this maintained as we head into winter, with growth in our key markets of Australia, up 3.3 percent for the year, and China, up 32.3 percent, is a good sign," Bowler said in a statement.

Statistics New Zealand's International Travel and Migration figures showed overall arrivals for the month were 140,841, up 0.1 percent on the same period last year.

Holiday arrivals grew by 3.2 percent and visiting family and relative arrivals up 6.7 percent compared to the year ending May 2011.

China continued to show strong growth with holiday arrivals up 61.1 percent for the month, said Bowler.

"We can see that more work needs to be done to increase visitor stay days through attracting longer-staying, higher-value visitors to New Zealand," he said.

"Germany is a good example. While we have seen German holiday arrivals decline recently, down 4.1 percent year to date, when you look length of stay with arrival numbers over a longer period of time we can see that Germany has generated the third highest number of stay days in New Zealand since 2005.

"This places them ahead of the US and China and only just behind the UK.

"While China continues to deliver high number of arrivals, we need to increase the number of stay days to realize the full potential value of this market," he said.