Visit the Kiwi way

The New Zealand Department of Conservation as just launched a new campaign designed to encourage tourists—whether foreign or Kiwi—to “Visit the Kiwi Way”. It’s a good idea—and it’s needed.

The things the video above mentions are all things that tourists do or don’t do, as the case may be, and they often have a huge impact on the New Zealand environment because of it. By educating visitors on what we expect of them—and using typical Kiwi humour to do so—we may get visitors to treat the natural environment with more respect.

The campaign includes all the usual things, such as information to encourage visitors to respect the land, environment, and wildlife, but also a few other things that tourists may not know, like that they’ll need a permit to fly a drone on Conservation land. Actually, there are other restrictions on drones elsewhere, too, something many Kiwis don’t even know.

Tourism brings in more foreign spending to New Zealand than any other industry. All up, it makes around $35 billion for New Zealand, two thirds of which is domestic and one third is foreign. The tourism industry employs 7.5% of the New Zealand workforce. All of which means that the tourism sector is VERY important to the country, and is projected to keep growing.

So, with the industry growing, we need tourists to do their part to help keep New Zealand’s natural world everything tourists expect it to be. Hopefully this campaign will help achieve that goal.