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The top industry earner for New
Zealand is tourism with over 2 million tourists
coming into the country every year. New Zealand is
touted as a clean and green outdoor playground, with
the usual spots being nature regions such as the
Tongariro Alpine Crossing and Milford Sound, while
the most common tourist activities include whale
watching or bungee jumping.
Most of the tourists who arrive
in New Zealand enter through the airport in Auckland
which managed, in 2004, more than 11 million
passengers. |
In demand destinations are the Waitomo Caves, Rotorua,
Queenstown, and Milford Sound. Several visitors travel over
many distances through the nation during their visits,
usually employing hired cars or coach lines.
The nation is globally seen as a first class destination for
vacations as evidenced by the number of awards it has
received such as being selected as the world’s most favorite
holiday destination by the Conde Nast Traveler magazine
readers (a magazine which specializes in luxury travels) in
2008, even though it slid down to 2nd place in 2009.
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It was also listed as the best
holiday destination overseas in the 2007 poll of the
Daily Telegraph, the UK's most prominent of such
polls. Since the beginning of an advertising
campaign in 2000 by Tourism New Zealand, there has
been a growth of over sixty percent in the number of
British citizens arriving in New Zealand.
The nation’s official agency for tourism is Tourism
New Zealand. It is continuously promoting the nation
as a destination globally. Recent efforts include a
seven million NZ dollar China campaign, centering on
Shanghai, and collaborating to come up with a Google
Earth layer for tourism in New Zealand, the first
nation to be given such an honor. Environmental
concerns by the public in general over the possible
impacts of air travel on the environment may
jeopardize the growth of tourism in New Zealand, as
nearly all visitors fly a long way to get to New
Zealand. |
Nevertheless, the data from the Ministry of Tourism
predicts a 4 percent yearly growth in the number of
visitors in New Zealand, with over 3 million
visitors yearly to be arrived at in 2014.
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It is still not clear how the carbon neutral policy
of New Zealand will impress on tourism in the
future.
Several researchers are arguing that the
emissions of carbon caused by tourism are much more
than normally considered, that their mitigation or
offsetting will be very hard, and that this fact
poses a grave threat to the nation's major supply of
overseas income.
Maybe the best known motto is
"Don't leave town until you've seen the country".
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Nevertheless, because of the absence of competition,
transportation fares for a number of local flights can be
more expensive than the rates for flights to Australia.
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