Travel in New Zealand: the length of two islands on foot and by road

Who visits and from where

Stats NZ counts every border crossing. In the year to December 2025 overseas visitor arrivals numbered 3.51 million, 196,000 more than in 2024, and New Zealand residents returning from trips abroad numbered 3.11 million. December is a busy month: 502,600 overseas visitors arrived in December 2025, 95% of the 528,200 who arrived in December 2019, before the pandemic closed the border. Of those December visitors, 41% came from Australia, 12% from the United States, 8% from the United Kingdom and 6% from China.

Australia's share follows from distance. The flight across the Tasman takes three to four hours, and Australians accounted for 41.8% of visitor arrivals across 2024, with New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria sending the most. Of the fourteen nationalities that send the most visitors, all but India, China, the Philippines and Fiji could enter without a visa. Since 1 October 2019 visitors from 60 countries have needed an electronic travel authority, the NZeTA, and most international visitors, Australians and Pacific Islanders excepted, also pay the International Visitor Conservation and Tourism Levy.

The state has been in the business for a long time. A Department of Tourist and Health Resorts was created in 1901, and through most of the twentieth century it ran hotels and arranged itineraries, with Milford Sound among the early destinations. Tourism New Zealand, the official tourism agency, markets the country abroad as clean and green under the slogan "100% Pure New Zealand".

How visitors move through the country

Most international visitors arrive by air, and Auckland Airport handled 11.5 million international passengers in 2019; in 2009 about 2% of visitors came by sea. Many visitors then travel long distances during a stay, usually by coach or hired car, and spend time in Auckland, Rotorua, Wellington, Christchurch and Queenstown. Traffic drives on the left.

Air travel is common because there are few alternatives over longer distances. A flight from Auckland to Napier, about 400 kilometres, takes just over an hour, against nearly five hours by car or seven by bus, and the trunk air routes link Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin and Queenstown. Passenger rail is limited to three routes, Auckland to Wellington, Picton to Christchurch and Christchurch to Greymouth, run as scenic day trips. Between the islands, the Interislander and Bluebridge ferries run between Wellington and Picton, a route of 50 nautical miles; the Interislander alone carries around one million passengers and 230,000 vehicles a year, and it has carried rail wagons as well as cars since its first roll-on roll-off sailing on 11 August 1962. That first ship, the Aramoana, crossed in 3 hours 20 minutes and cut travel time from Wellington to Christchurch from 11 hours on the old overnight steamer to Lyttelton to nine hours by ferry and road; the Picton ferries went on to replace the Lyttelton service entirely.

For those on foot, Te Araroa runs the length of the country, and for cyclists there is the New Zealand Cycle Trail.

What the seasons mean for a visit

The seasons are the reverse of the northern hemisphere's, and the industry markets that to northern travellers looking for summer in their winter. NIWA, the national climate institute, gives January or February as the warmest month and July as the coldest, with mean annual temperatures from 10°C in the south to 16°C in the north. Near the coast the difference between summer and winter is small; inland and east of the ranges it reaches 14°C.

Snow falls mostly on the mountains, and some destinations make winter sports their seasonal speciality. Most of the country gets at least 2,000 hours of sunshine a year, and the summer UV index is often very high, reaching extreme in the north and in the mountains. Rain is the variable that decides a trip in the south-west: Fiordland receives 5,000 to 8,000 millimetres a year, and the West Coast of the South Island is wetter than the land east of the Alps, just over 100 kilometres away. The weather can change quickly and without warning anywhere in the country.

The regions differ more than the national averages suggest. Northland, the peninsula north of Auckland, is close to subtropical; Central Otago, behind the ranges, has an almost continental climate with hot summers and cold winters; and Nelson, Marlborough and the Bay of Plenty receive about 2,400 hours of sunshine a year. Most settled lowland gets 600 to 1,600 millimetres of rain a year, Christchurch about 640 and Hamilton 1,325. In summer a fire lit in the open is banned on public conservation land during a designated season.

Where the Great Walks run

Walking, known locally as tramping, is a main reason for coming. The Department of Conservation manages 8.5 million hectares, about 30% of the land, including 13 national parks, and creates and maintains many of the walking tracks. Its eleven Great Walks are well formed, easy to follow and reached from towns served by local operators, and they are booked in advance: when the department's page was read in October 2026, bookings were open for stays to 30 June 2027.

Fiordland carries three of the eleven, and the Milford Track is known well beyond the country. The Tongariro Alpine Crossing is one of the names the tourism industry markets abroad alongside Milford Sound and Abel Tasman National Park.

What the North Island offers visitors

Auckland is the usual first stop, a city on an isthmus between two harbours, built across a volcanic field of dozens of cones. North of it lie Northland and the Bay of Islands, where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed in 1840 and where the first mission stations were built. In the centre of the island, Rotorua's geothermal fields, with their geysers, hot springs and mud pools, have drawn visitors since the nineteenth century, when Te Arawa set up tourism ventures around the town. The Waitomo caves, north of Mount Taranaki, are lit by thousands of glowworms.

Tongariro National Park, south of Lake Taupō, was inscribed by UNESCO in 1990 and extended in 1993 as a mixed natural and cultural site; the Northern Circuit and the Alpine Crossing run among its volcanoes, Tongariro, Ngāuruhoe and Ruapehu, whose slopes are also used by skiers. Mount Taranaki stands alone to the west. At the southern tip is Wellington, the capital, with Te Papa, the national museum, and on the east coast Napier, rebuilt in Art Deco after the earthquake of 1931.

What the South Island offers visitors

Ferries from Wellington arrive at Picton in the Marlborough Sounds, drowned river valleys, and roads run west to Abel Tasman National Park and south to Christchurch on the Canterbury Plains. Two coastal landforms near the main routes come from old volcanoes: Banks Peninsula, beside Christchurch, is the eroded remnant of two volcanoes, and Dunedin sits on the remains of one that first erupted about 13 million years ago. In the far north-west of the island, Farewell Spit runs out into the sea, built from sediment carried along the coast. From the plains the routes climb to the high country: glacial lakes such as Tekapo and Pūkaki, Aoraki / Mount Cook at 3,724 metres, and over the Alps to the Fox and Franz Josef glaciers on the West Coast, a strip of high rainfall and native forest.

Queenstown stands on Lake Wakatipu, and the Queenstown-Lakes district had 47,808 residents at the census of 2023, a rise of 22.1% since 2018; bungee jumping and whale watching are among the activities the industry markets to visitors. Fiordland and Milford Sound lie in the south-west, inside the World Heritage area UNESCO lists as Te Wahipounamu, South West New Zealand, inscribed in 1990. Stewart Island, Rakiura, lies 30 kilometres across Foveaux Strait. The Sub-Antarctic Islands, a World Heritage site since 1998, have controlled access, and feature films including The Lord of the Rings trilogy were shot on location for the scenery.

How visitors are received on a marae

Many visitors meet Māori culture first at Rotorua, where Te Arawa have run tourism ventures since the nineteenth century, or at the kapa haka performances staged at tourist venues across the country. A marae is a different setting: a working community space, a group of buildings around an open courtyard, where families and tribes hold weddings, funerals and church services and receive guests with a pōwhiri.

Protocol is observed there. It is common practice to remove shoes before entering the wharenui, the meeting house, out of respect for the ancestors who are carved into it and held to be present inside. Tapu, the sacred or restricted, can apply to objects, people and places, mountains among them. Visitors who are invited onto a marae are guests of the people who hold it, the tangata whenua.

What lies beyond the two main islands

Stewart Island, Rakiura, has its own Great Walk, the Rakiura Track, and lies 30 kilometres off the South Island across Foveaux Strait. Closer to Auckland, Waiheke Island is about 22 kilometres from the city centre and Great Barrier Island lies further out in the Hauraki Gulf; D'Urville Island sits in the Marlborough Sounds. The Chatham Islands, some 800 kilometres east of the South Island and home to the Moriori, keep their own clock, 45 minutes ahead of the mainland. Further out, the Kermadec and Subantarctic islands are inhabited only by small numbers of Department of Conservation staff.

New Zealanders travel too. Periodic tourism campaigns have urged them to see their own country before going abroad, while many in their twenties leave for a long working stay abroad, the OE.

How much the visitors are worth

Tourism directly contributed NZ$16.2 billion, or 5.8% of GDP, in the year ending March 2019, and indirect effects added a further 4.3%. It supported 188,000 full-time-equivalent jobs in 2016, nearly 7.5% of the workforce, and spending by international visitors accounted for 17.1% of export earnings. Domestic travellers spend more than foreign ones: in the year to March 2020 they spent $24.4 billion against $17.5 billion by international visitors.

The border closed to non-residents in March 2020 and stayed closed to most visitors until 2022, and a travel bubble with Australia opened in April 2021 was paused and then suspended in July 2021. December 2025's arrivals stood at 95% of the same month in 2019. Air routes move the numbers: after Air New Zealand began non-stop flights from Auckland to Buenos Aires in December 2015, visitors from Argentina rose from 5,400 in 2015 to 15,300 in 2016. In 2007 the Ministry of Tourism forecast growth of 4% a year, to 3.2 million visitors annually by 2014; the count for the year to December 2025 was 3.51 million. Almost every visitor arrives by long-haul flight, and Wikipedia's account of the industry records researchers' concern that the carbon emissions of that travel will be hard to offset.