The Destinate Weekly Roundup w/c 28 September 2026
There are a few developments this week that I think tourism operators should genuinely pay attention to, and happily, they’re not just another version of the stories we’ve been talking about for the past fortnight.
This week I’m looking at an often-overlooked visitor market here in New Zealand, a significant development in AI travel booking, what Australia is learning about incentive travel, the growing power of events to drive entire trips, and an interesting shift in Australia–US air access.
Are we overlooking visitors who are staying with friends and family?
Tourism New Zealand has launched Don’t be a Stranger, targeting people in Australia, the UK and Canada who have friends or family in New Zealand but keep putting off the visit.
What caught my attention wasn’t necessarily the campaign itself, but the size of the market behind it.
Visiting friends and relatives, or VFR, represents around 30 percent of New Zealand’s international arrivals and approximately $2.6 billion in annual visitor spend.
For activity operators, that market is particularly interesting because someone staying with family doesn’t necessarily behave like a traditional international tourist.
Their accommodation might be free, but they still eat out, explore the region and book experiences. And often their local hosts come with them.
That presents a very simple marketing opportunity.
Instead of always talking directly to the international visitor, talk to the Kiwi hosting them.
Got friends or family coming to stay this summer? What are you going to show them?
For many tourism businesses, that could be a surprisingly effective local campaign.
More information:Tourism New Zealand – Don’t be a Stranger campaign
AI is moving from suggesting holidays to actually booking them
We’ve talked plenty about AI changing how travellers discover destinations, but this week brought a much more significant step.
Meta’s new personal AI agent, Muse, can take actions on behalf of the user, including browsing websites, making purchases and booking travel. At Meta Connect last week, the company also confirmed that Expedia will soon become a Muse connector, allowing users to plan travel through the agent.
That is different from asking an AI tool:
Where should I stay in New Zealand?
We’re moving towards:
Find me somewhere to stay, compare the options and book it.
And eventually the same thing will happen with activities.
For tourism businesses, I think the implication is fairly clear.
Your website increasingly needs to make sense not only to a traveller and Google, but to the systems acting on that traveller’s behalf.
That means clear product names, accurate prices, locations, duration, inclusions, availability, cancellation conditions and structured information become incredibly important.
Beautiful storytelling still matters.
But the machines need to understand what you actually sell.
Australia has an interesting lesson in what “premium” incentive travel now looks like
The latest edition of Business Events Australia’s Australia Next includes a case study of an incentive programme for almost 1,000 Indonesian delegates travelling through Sydney, the Blue Mountains and Hunter Valley.
What I found particularly interesting was the event planner’s definition of premium.
It wasn’t about making everything extravagant.
It was about making the entire experience feel seamless, considered and effortless, while incorporating local landscapes, food, wine, nature and experiences that felt connected to the destination.
That is a very useful lesson for smaller New Zealand tourism businesses wanting to work with incentives.
Premium doesn’t necessarily mean champagne, helicopters and enormous budgets.
It can mean good hosting, private access, smooth logistics, something genuinely local, and an experience the guest couldn’t easily arrange themselves.
That plays very nicely to New Zealand’s strengths.
It also means smaller owner-operated experiences shouldn’t automatically assume they are too small for the business-events market.
They simply need to understand where they fit within the programme.
More information:Business Events Australia – Meet the planner behind the 1,000-person incentive programme
Travellers are increasingly choosing the event first and the destination second
This is another trend I think tourism businesses should watch closely.
Fresh research around what is being called live tourism shows concerts, festivals, sporting events and other major moments increasingly influencing where people travel.
Research released by Live Nation last week found live music fans took 38 percent more trips than other travellers. Among those travelling for live music, 87 percent stayed longer in the destination and 76 percent had returned to a destination they originally discovered because of a live event.
Skift describes the shift rather neatly: instead of travellers choosing a destination and then looking for things to do, some are now choosing the moment first and building the holiday around it.
There is a practical lesson here for operators.
When a major concert, sporting event, festival or conference is coming to your region, don’t just assume everyone attending has already planned their trip.
Start marketing around it.
Coming to Taupō for an event? Stay another night.
In Auckland for a concert? Add another couple of days and head south.
Travelling for a conference? Here’s what to do before you fly home.
The event may be what gets somebody onto the plane.
The tourism industry’s job is to give them a reason to stay longer.
Qantas is removing New Zealand from one important Australia–US journey
Qantas confirmed last week that it will launch the first non-stop commercial flights between Sydney and New York from mid-2028, with tickets going on sale in August next year.
The new service will cut around three hours from the journey. Qantas currently flies Sydney–New York via Auckland.
I wouldn’t overstate the immediate impact for New Zealand tourism, but it is worth noting.
As ultra-long-haul aircraft increasingly allow travellers to bypass traditional stopover points, being geographically “on the way” becomes less of an advantage.
Airlines are steadily removing friction from long-haul travel.
That means destinations need an increasingly strong reason for the traveller to actually stop, rather than simply transit.
There’s a bigger lesson in that for tourism too.
Convenience will get better everywhere.
Our competitive advantage needs to come from the experiences travellers can only have here.
More information:Executive Traveller – Qantas Sydney–New York Project Sunrise flights
New Zealand’s tourism data is getting better, but be careful comparing it
There were three useful New Zealand tourism data releases last week: the August Accommodation Data Programme, Tourism Volumes and Flows data and Monthly Regional Tourism Estimates.
MBIE has also been making ongoing improvements to the regional spending series, while correcting some historical visitor-count data and warning that parts of the visitor series should not yet be compared across the April 2026 methodology change.
That sounds very data-geeky, but there’s an important practical point.
Tourism businesses and destinations now have access to increasingly detailed information about who is visiting, where they are travelling, how long they stay and where visitor spending is occurring.
Use it.
But don’t grab one number from a dashboard and immediately declare success or failure.
Look at several indicators together, understand what changed in the methodology, and watch the trend rather than a single month.
For operators, the most useful questions are often simple:
Are more international visitors actually reaching my region?
Are they staying longer?
Is visitor spend growing?
And is my own business capturing its fair share?
More information:MBIE Tourism Evidence and Insights Centre
What I’d be thinking about this week
There are four things I’d take from all of this.
First, don’t underestimate the VFR visitor. There may be an easy summer campaign sitting right in front of you by marketing to locals who have visitors arriving.
Second, start treating AI-readiness as distribution readiness. Your product information needs to be accurate, structured and easy for both humans and technology to understand.
Third, if you want business-events and incentive business, think less about making something “luxury” and more about making it special, local and incredibly easy to deliver.
And finally, look at the events happening around you.
The concert, sporting event or conference might not be your event, but the people travelling to attend it are very definitely potential customers.
That’s probably my biggest takeaway this week.
Sometimes the best tourism marketing opportunity isn’t convincing somebody to travel.
It’s recognising that they’re already coming, and giving them one more reason to stay.
The Destinate Weekly Roundup is a regular look at the tourism sales, marketing, visitor-market and distribution developments worth paying attention to, with practical takeaways for New Zealand tourism businesses.
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