Banning tourists is not the answer

The Herald reports:

About $16.5 million will have been spent by June on what to do about over-tourism in Milford Sound, but Tourism Minister Matt Doocey says the work has been, at times, “incoherent”. Are we about to see very little change after so much money over more than seven years? Derek Cheng reports. …

One of the plan’s key proposals is to put most of the 5000 to 6000 people a day on buses, starting in Te Anau. There would be several places of interest – to be developed – along the Milford SH94 corridor where the buses would stop.

Other suggestions include banning cruise ships and fixed-wing aircraft, which some tourism operators fear would see them go belly-up.

So Labour spent $17 million on a working group, whose answer was to ban people being able to drive, fly or cruise to Milford Sound!

Tourism is a huge part of our economy, providing hundreds of thousands of jobs. Making it harder for people to access our most popular tourist destination is as daft as refusing to reopen the track to our second most popular one.

The obvious answer is infrastructure upgrades.