Top Host Regions

Think about the term, ‘Host Region’… what does this mean?

• To host is to host a person or persons.
• Regions refers to the regions / provinces / states within a country.

Definition: A host region refers to a region/s of a country which accommodates a person/s during their travels.

An international visitor is most likely to visit various regions within a country whilst there, depending on their purpose of travel.  For example, a visitor who travels to New Zealand for the purpose of a holiday is likely to visit several regions, whereas a person who is travelling for the purpose of a conference, may only visit one region, the region being the host region of that conference which they are attending.

Check out the table below which shows where our international visitors stayed during their time in New Zealand.  There are three sets of data within this table. 

• Total annual guest (both domestic & international visitor) nights
• International guest nights
• Domestic guest nights

This refers to the actual total number of nights spent in various accommodation types, over a year period by all tourists who visit a particular region.  You will see on the table below, that there is a comparison shown between YE June 2018 and 2019.

International Total Guest Nights refers to the total number of nights international tourists stayed in a specific region. For example, in the period YE June 2019, international visitors stayed a total of 649,440 nights in Northland.

This total figure 649,440 comes from adding up all the nights those international tourists stayed in Northland; some tourists may have stayed only one night, while others may have stayed for 5, 10 or 20 nights etc.

Host Region Data For International Visitors

Data sourced from MBIE Accommodation survey YE June 2019

TOTAL ANNUAL guest nights (YE june 2019)

These figures refer to the number of nights spent in a region by domestic visitors- those that live in New Zealand but are staying away from home – this could be in the same region where they normally live, or they could be visiting from another region.  For example, someone living in Hamilton goes to stay in Raglan for the weekend – both are in the Waikato, but this is still classed as Domestic Tourism.

Domestic Total Guest Nights

Data sourced from MBIE Accommodation survey YE June 2019

Generating regions, like generating markets, refers to “where (which region) the tourists have come from”.  Therefore, in regard to domestic tourism, the generating region is where the tourist actually lives in New Zealand.

When looking at the rankings in the previous exercise, it is important to reflect on why these generating regions feature in the top five. Some reasons could be due to:

• The access to airports which enables tourists to getaway for domestic breaks
• A relatively dense population in some of these areas (Auckland, Wellington, Tauranga, Hamilton, Christchurch) which means higher numbers of potential tourists.
• Close proximity to tourist areas of interest E.g.  Aucklanders can travel to Northland, Coromandel, Bay of Plenty etc. easily.
• The large selection of domestic flight routes available to escape to many areas of NZ - plus the South Island is on their doorstep.