The questions behind the tourism headlines

International visitors to New Zealand spent an estimated NZ$5.75 billion during the March 2026 quarter, according to the latest International Visitor Survey from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE). During the same period, 91% of international visitors said they were satisfied or very satisfied with their visit, 96% said their expectations were met or exceeded and 96% were likely to recommend New Zealand to others.

Across the Tasman, international visitors made 8.5 million trips to Australia in the year ending March 2026, up 10% from the previous year, while spending rose 20% to $40.9 billion, according to Tourism Research Australia.

Numbers like these are closely watched across the tourism sector, but marketers usually need to get underneath them. Who is contributing most to visitor spending? How long are different groups staying and what are they doing while they are there? How do experiences differ by age, country of residence or reason for travel? Are the visitors spending the most also likely to return or recommend the destination?

Tourism organizations often have research that can answer at least some of these questions. The work comes in finding the relevant data, looking across different measures and being able to investigate a new question without starting another lengthy analysis and reporting process.

There is a lot underneath a tourism headline

New Zealand’s International Visitor Survey contains many ways to examine the visitor economy. Survey data like this can be brought into Harmoni so marketers can move between groups and measures, while tools such as Discover can identify statistically significant differences that may otherwise take considerable manual analysis to find.

Take the NZ$5.75 billion quarterly spend figure. The purpose of travel changes what sits behind that total. Holiday visitors had a median spend of NZ$4,915, compared with NZ$2,289 among people visiting friends and relatives. Median daily spend was NZ$432 for holiday visitors and NZ$170 for those visiting friends and relatives.

The country of residence gives marketers another cut. Australian visitors had a median spend of NZ$2,472, compared with NZ$4,594 among visitors from the rest of the world. Australians stayed for a median of eight days, while visitors from the rest of the world stayed for 14.

From there, a researcher could look at age within a source market, compare satisfaction among different types of travelers or examine whether people participating in particular activities stay longer or spend more. Harmoni allows users to keep moving through the data as those questions develop, rather than deciding all the cuts they will need in advance.

What happens to all those previous studies?

Many tourism organizations have trackers and visitor studies stretching back years. New waves arrive alongside annual research, campaign studies and projects focused on particular audiences or experiences. Different suppliers may be involved along the way, with datasets arriving in SPSS, Excel or other formats.

Several years of tracking can show whether visitor groups are changing, whether satisfaction has moved and what happened after a campaign, infrastructure change or other intervention. Doing so takes more work when individual studies and waves remain scattered across files, tools and supplier platforms. Analysts can end up locating datasets, preparing variables or recreating previous cuts before getting to the analysis they wanted to do.

Harmoni provides a single environment for preparing, analyzing and reporting survey data from different collection providers and sources. Datasets can be prepared for continued use, allowing a return to previous studies and waves as new questions come up.

Following a question through the data

One New Zealand tourism organization runs monthly visitor profiling, annual tracking and custom studies, with feedback collected through airport interviews and digital surveys. Bringing that research together in Harmoni reduced quarterly reporting that once took days to a matter of hours. Ad hoc questions can also be investigated while a discussion is happening; in one meeting, the team was able to answer a stakeholder’s follow-up question on the spot.

The team also combined visitor feedback with activity participation data, identifying lower ratings among younger travelers for hiking and biking trails. Their responses pointed to signage and transportation links, which led to changes made in partnership with local councils. The organization was then able to track the results over time.

At Tātaki Auckland Unlimited, Harmoni is used for consumer research across venues including Auckland Live, stadiums and other major Auckland attractions. More than 20 stakeholders use Harmoni Viewer licenses to access dashboards, while the insights team handles the underlying survey data and analysis. Operations managers use the results for decisions around parking, traffic flows and event timing, and common measures such as Net Promoter Score can be tracked across venues.

Harmoni’s Discover functionality gives users another way into their data. It automatically analyzes differences between groups and identifies those that are statistically significant, reducing the need to work through large numbers of crosstabs to find the patterns worth investigating further.

Tourism research rarely comes from one place

Visitor research may be commissioned across different programs and handled by different suppliers, with campaign research, trackers and experience studies arriving in different formats. Harmoni is agency agnostic, allowing survey data from different collection providers and sources to be prepared and analyzed in the same platform.

The range of public data available to tourism organizations adds another layer. Tourism Research Australia's Australian Tourism Data Dashboard, for example, combines information from TRA with data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Department of Education, Bureau of Infrastructure and Transport Research Economics and Department of Home Affairs. It covers visitor numbers and spending alongside source markets, employment, aviation and other tourism measures.

An individual tourism organization will have its own mix. Visitor surveys may sit alongside campaign research, experience tracking and other internal or external data. One question about quarterly visitor spending might lead to purpose of travel, then source market, age or length of stay. Keep following it and the analysis can eventually get down to something as specific as the signs on a hiking trail.

See how Harmoni can help your team bring tourism research together, investigate new questions and make findings easier to access. Contact us today.