The results of our Official Information Act request to Tourism NZ are in: William and Kate’s last Royal tour in 2014 generated $70 million in advertising value for New Zealand! When we kicked this request off in January, we said this was implausible. And it turns out that the benefits are in fact just an estimate, based on assumptions of what Tourism New Zealand would otherwise have had to spend on advertising, by counting up mentions of New Zealand (even where it’s both Australia and New Zealand) in the news media.
There is nothing concrete to show what the outcomes of this notional advertising spending are to show benefits of $70m, other than to say more people searched for hotels in New Zealand online, which in itself cannot be linked to notional spending on advertising. Put simply, an estimate is not a benefit, it cannot be honestly claimed that Royal tours benefit New Zealand to the extent claimed.
That is not to say that there isn’t any benefit from the Royal tours. I’m sure that there are at least some people who will see the Royals visiting New Zealand in the news media and then want to travel here. The exact number though is unknown, and more importantly, it’s not even measured so can’t be claimed as a benefit. What is mentioned in Tourism New Zealand’s estimates is that hotel website Trivago reported a 70% increase in searches for New Zealand hotels and motels after the tour. We don’t know if that was because of the tour though, and we don’t actually know if that translated into bookings and therefore money in the door. What we do know is that the number of tourists arriving has increased from markets mentioned in Tourism New Zealand’s analysis - but the evidence on that is that the increase was happening anyway.
According to Statistics NZ’s numbers post the Royal Tour of 2014, the standout performer was tourists from the United States, which increased by 10% in the year after the tour. But, the following year (2015-16) it increased again by a whopping 27%. It turns out that this is largely thanks to airlines flying to and from the United States adding new flights, and thereby increasing capacity, particularly to Hawaii. So clearly other factors are much more important than the tour, and again, there’s nothing to actually link the tour to the increase in tourists.
The overstatement of the benefit of Royal tours to New Zealand isn’t surprising. It’s reflective of the state of the debate that we’re now seeing this sort of misinformation sneaking in - without much else to say for the monarchy, there’s a tendency to try and build a fiscal case where no really exists. But the actual fiscal case for the monarchy, once again, simply doesn’t stack up for New Zealand.