New Zealand is one of the smallest source markets in Asia-Pacific and one of the most committed. In the June 2026 year, New Zealand residents returned from 3.09 million short-term overseas trips, according to Stats NZ, a record for a June year in a country of fewer than six million people. Kiwis travel often, they travel a long way, and when they go, they stay away for weeks rather than days.
Rachel Williams, founder and managing director of Viva Expeditions, joined a recent virtual AdventureCONNECT hosted by the Adventure Travel Trade Association (ATTA) to discuss what the New Zealand buyer looks for. Viva Expeditions is a New Zealand based wholesaler and tour operator selling journeys across Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and the polar regions. The session closed a year-long ATTA series on Asia-Pacific source markets, following earlier conversations on China, India, Japan, and Australia.
For Williams, adventure describes where a traveler goes as much as what they do there.
"I think of adventure as that activity side of adventure, but then also the adventure very much in terms of destination," she said. "Destinations where we step out of our comfort zones and we step into difference. When we're always traveling somewhere familiar, we're going to have a nice holiday, but the impact's different. We're not really going to be changed."
A Market That Still Runs Through the Travel Agent
The most distinctive feature of this market is its distribution structure. The retail and wholesale chain that has receded in many parts of the world remains the standard route to the New Zealand consumer.
"We still very much operate on a wholesale model," Williams said. "Your client goes into your retail travel agency, your retail travel agency comes to your wholesaler, who is then going out to all of your DMCs and smaller tour operators. So it's very relationship based. Loyalty, confidence, and trust are big things here in the market."
A direct enquiry does not necessarily produce a direct booking. Consumers often research with a wholesaler, gather the details they need, and then book with their retail agent, which returns the sale to the wholesaler with commission attached. Williams cited an Australia and New Zealand figure presented at an industry event some years ago, indicating that around 80 percent of travelers booking Latin America from New Zealand booked through a retail agent, and said the pattern still holds. The practical consequence for suppliers is that pricing has to be consistent across every channel, because the same enquiry may arrive twice.
That runs against the direct-booking trend in several markets, although it is consistent with the movement ATTA has recorded on the supply side. In the 2026 Adventure Travel Trends & Insights Report, the operators surveyed reported 38 percent of bookings coming through partners and travel agents, up from 32 percent the year before, while direct bookings slipped from 57 percent to 53 percent.
Long Trips and Multiple Countries
New Zealanders receive four weeks of annual leave a year plus public holidays, and distance does the rest. Williams described three-week trips as fairly standard, two weeks as short, and six-week itineraries as common enough not to be remarkable, particularly among retired and semi-retired travelers.
Those trips rarely stay inside one country. A first South America itinerary might combine Buenos Aires, Iguazu Falls, and Rio de Janeiro with Machu Picchu and the Amazon in Peru, the Galapagos in Ecuador, and a finish in Santiago. Africa works the same way, with East Africa treated as one trip and Southern Africa saved for another.
"In our minds, we're not going back there," Williams said. "Next time we'll go somewhere else. So we're going to do as much of it as we can while we're there."
Williams has been encouraging neighboring tourism boards to market jointly rather than separately for that reason. It is also worth noting how far this pattern sits from the global average. ATTA's Adventure Travel Market Sizing and the New Adventure Traveler study, based on roughly 5,000 international travelers across 13 countries, found an average trip length of about 11 days.
Who Is Buying
Two groups dominate. The first is retired and semi-retired baby boomers, who have both the time and the money to absorb a four-week absence. The second is affluent working professionals, traveling with their families or without children. Budget backpacker travel sits largely outside this part of the market, although multi-generational trips are common.
Williams raised succession as an industry concern rather than a consumer one. Retail agency databases in New Zealand are aging, and agencies that are not actively recruiting younger clients will feel it. She described a conversation in her own office about TikTok marketing, the reflex to dismiss it, and then the recognition that the clients now entering the market use those channels even if today's clients do not.
Hiking, Cycling, and the E-Bike Effect
Asked what Kiwi travelers actually do, Williams answered without hesitation: "Big hikers and cyclists." Ballooning, kayaking, and Zodiac excursions on polar voyages sell well. High-adrenaline pursuits do not. White water rafting in South America attracts very few of her clients, while a helicopter flight over Victoria Falls reads as genuinely adventurous to the same travelers.
E-bikes are widening that field, because people who would never have considered a multi-day cycling holiday will consider one when they know assistance is available on the hills. ATTA's State of the Cycling Tour Operators Industry report identified e-bikes as the most frequently cited trend among the 245 cycling operators surveyed, and electric-bike cycling ranked third among trending adventure activities globally in the 2026 Trends & Insights report, behind hiking and culinary experiences.
Williams expects the core to hold. "People are always going to want to be immersed in nature, walking or biking brings you closer to your surroundings,” she said.
Confidence, Connectivity, and a Narrower Map
New Zealanders have a reputation for going anywhere, and Williams was direct that this has softened since the pandemic. Destination choice has contracted toward the recognized names in each region, with Machu Picchu, Iguazu, the Galapagos, and Patagonia carrying bookings that once went further and deeper. Clients have called to cancel holidays in Botswana over an outbreak thousands of kilometres away, and many treat the Middle East as one undifferentiated region. Part of the sales job, in her view, is regionalizing the map for people and challenging those assumptions rather than working around them.
Air connectivity is the other half of the picture. Much of Viva's business is in the southern hemisphere, so Middle East disruption might not have been expected to bite. It did.
"May, June, and July were horrible months for us. Really, really slow," Williams said. "This month has actually bounced back."
Some of that is routing. Travelers are avoiding Gulf hubs, and they are also reluctant to transit the United States, which is pushing traffic through Singapore, China, and other Asian hubs. The Stats NZ figures point the same way. Resident arrivals from the United States fell by 29,000 over the June 2026 year, while arrivals from Japan reached a record 95,000. Williams said Kiwis view Japan with real confidence as a destination, for skiing and for culture.
Seasonality works in the industry's favor here. Kiwis are consistent shoulder season travelers who avoid peak periods in the destinations they visit, which makes them a useful audience for destinations managing crowding.
Sustainability Deepens on the Ground
Williams described New Zealand interest in sustainability as beginning with the environment and broadening once travelers arrive.
"In general, it begins as environmental mostly," she said. "They want to go somewhere, they don't want to see the rubbish, they want to go to unpolluted and beautiful places. But it's when they arrive and they go there that they start to appreciate more of the cultural and the economical side of things."
She also cautioned against assuming that the European regulatory environment translates. Sustainability messaging in New Zealand tends to be softer, and consumers do not respond well to being lectured. Travelers will choose the lower-impact option when it does not cost significantly more and does not reduce what they get to see and do, which is a familiar version of the gap between intention and action recorded across the wider industry.
Looking Ahead
Asked what will shape the next few years, Williams pointed first to operational technology. Adventure travel is a high-volume, low-margin business, and she sees efficiency, integrated systems, and better access to information as the difference between competing and not.
"I think it's a cool thing to be embraced and not afraid of, because I think it's going to be hard to compete without it," she said. "The margins just get tighter and tighter."
Her second point was positioning. With AI-assisted planning and OTA pricing both available to consumers, operators need to define who they sell to, understand the value they add, and charge for it. "If you're going to try to be cheap and you're competing against the machine, it's going to be the fastest way to the bottom," she said.
The third was demand, and it was the part she was most optimistic about. Travelers are chasing stories rather than destinations, and the shift is appearing in small ways first, with parents doing street food tours in Vietnam and clients asking for off-grid time in Patagonia rather than another set of landmarks.
How to Reach This Market
Williams was unambiguous about what works. Suppliers should not arrive expecting to sell.
"We don't do a hard sell here. We're not hard sell people, we don't like it," she said. "You need to build the relationships, find the right people, build the trust. A lot of it comes down to personal relationships."
In practice that means starting with the wholesalers, who hold access to the retail network, and then getting in front of travel agents through events and ongoing contact. Advertising alone will not carry a new product into this market, because the barrier is trust rather than visibility. For some suppliers, the faster route is association with a New Zealand brand that already holds it.
New Zealand will never be a volume market by regional standards. It is, however, a market that travels for three to four weeks at a time, crosses several borders on a single trip, returns to the same trusted intermediaries, and rewards suppliers who invest in the relationship well before the sale.
To learn more about connecting with New Zealand and Asia-Pacific adventure travel buyers, contact ATTA's Regional Director of APAC, Hannah Pearson.
ATTA members logged into the HUB can watch the full AdventureCONNECT recording.