International Travel

International travel statistics produced by Stats NZ measure the number and characteristics of international arrivals into New Zealand, and the number of international departures from New Zealand.

International travel counts the number of short-term overseas visitor and New Zealand-resident arrivals and departures. This is obtained from electronic passport and flight records, along with details from arrival cards for every passenger, supplied to Stats NZ by the New Zealand Customs. These electronic records include flight and passport details, such as date of travel, date of birth, sex, and country of citizenship.

The purpose of international travel statistics is to count passengers arriving into and departing New Zealand short-term. Passengers are split into one of three passenger types: overseas visitors, New Zealand-resident travellers, and migrants (permanent and long-term migrants). Short-term travellers are overseas visitors visiting New Zealand for less than 12 months; or people who live in New Zealand and are travelling overseas or arriving back after an absence of less than 12 months.

As the principal agency responsible for processing and publishing international travel statistics in New Zealand, Stats NZ seeks to provide information that meets the contractual, public policy, and community requirements for up-to-date official statistics at the local, regional, and national level.

Arrivals and departures of overseas visitors and New Zealand-resident travellers are key indicators of tourism and travel.

Where the data comes from

International travel statistics are based on electronic arrival and departure records for each passenger supplied to Stats NZ by the New Zealand Customs Service. These electronic records include flight and passport details, such as date of travel, date of birth, sex, and country of citizenship.

The New Zealand Customs Service also supplies Stats NZ with scanned images of the arrival card from every passenger. Additional detail such as country of residence and travel purpose is captured from these cards and added to the information from the electronic record.

Immigration New Zealand and Customs Service own the arrival cards, which are used to administer numerous New Zealand laws, in addition to producing statistics. Stats NZ only captures information from the cards for statistical purposes.

How the data is collected

Arrival card data are supplied to Stats NZ to enable full processing of international travel data. Image recognition technology is used to automatically recognise and code responses from each arrival card. Processing staff then manually capture any required information which was not captured automatically - as not every response can be clearly recognised by the automated software.

The imaging system automatically determines all the information required for almost 9 in every 10 cards (meaning about one million still require manual completion each typical year).

Some response fields are required from each card. These include the passport number and birth date, so each card can be matched to the electronic record supplied by Customs containing passport and flight details. Also, responses to length of stay/absence and country last/next lived in questions are required from every card, to determine the person's passenger type (overseas visitor, NZ-resident traveller, or permanent and long-term migrant).

Most other response fields are only required for a sample of passengers, and required fields vary by passenger type and direction.

Responses to some questions are not captured at all, including the first and last names of the passenger. Responses to questions on the back of the arrival card are not captured, nor are responses to the seat number, email address, and phone number questions on the front of the arrival card.

Passenger counts

International travel statistics relate to the number of passenger movements to and from New Zealand, rather than to the number of people – that is, the multiple movements of individual people during a given reference period are each counted separately. For example, a New Zealand resident making five business trips overseas within a year would be counted as five arrivals and five departures.

Determination of passenger type

Passenger type is determined from responses to questions on the arrival card about how long the person is in or away from New Zealand, and where they are living for 12 months or more. A person's travel history (their other arrivals and departures) will also be used to determine their passenger type.

Changes in intentions

A person may change their intentions after their arrival or departure, which may mean the recorded passenger type becomes incorrect. For instance, a person who indicated they were arriving for a short-term stay may actually stay permanently. In this case, they would be recorded as a short-term overseas visitor, even though they became a migrant/permanent and long-term migrant. Stats NZ does not revise published statistics to adjust for such changes.

Seasonally adjusted and trend series

Stats NZ also produces seasonally adjusted and trend series for each of the passenger types and directions (eg total visitor arrivals). These series attempt to remove regular seasonal variation so each month (or quarter) can be compared.

Seasonally adjusted figures are only estimates, and are revised every month as more data becomes available. Trend series are a smoothed version of the seasonally adjusted series.

Stats NZ can provide assistance on the interpretation of seasonally adjusted and trend series. If quoting seasonally adjusted and/or trend series, this should be clearly stated.

Confidentiality

Stats NZ releases statistics derived from arriving and departing passenger records. It does not release the records of individual passengers.

Data is continually collected and processed.

International travel data is released at pre-specified times to ensure all users have equal access to the data. These release dates are published well in advance on the release calendar on Stats NZ's website.

Weekly provisional statistics

Provisional international travel statistics are published on a weekly basis, usually at 2pm on a Wednesday. These include three different data series with different reference dates:

• Weekly travel data for short-term overseas visitor and New Zealand resident arrivals. Weekly and four-weekly data in downloadable files include the 10 main source and 10 main destination countries, as well as world regions and totals. The CSV files include additional source and main destination countries. Data is in downloadable files

•Daily arrivals and departures data based solely on border-crossings into and out of New Zealand. These data do not incorporate arrival card information so no breakdown of traveller type (eg overseas visitor, New Zealand resident) is available. Data is in the downloadable file: 'Daily movements across New Zealand border'.

•Stock estimates of travellers: visitors in New Zealand, and New Zealand residents travelling overseas, based on arrivals and departures.

All of these data series are provisional and subject to revision during the full process of producing international travel statistics. No further detail is available until the release of monthly data.

Release of monthly data

Monthly international travel data is released at 10.45am, usually 30 working days after the end of the month. The release of December and January data takes longer after the end of these months, due to the Christmas-New Year holidays and high passenger volumes.

Additional embargo of port data before 2018

Before 2018, New Zealand port and overseas port data were released two working days after the release of monthly international travel and migration statistics. This was part of an agreement with airlines and airports which allowed Stats NZ to release this otherwise confidential data. From 2018, all travel data including port data were released at the same time.

Actual and sampled counts

Some fields, such as citizenship, date of birth, and sex, are held for all arrivals and departures. However, some fields are only collected for a sample of passengers.

Only short-term (overseas visitors and New Zealand-resident travellers) are sampled. Required fields are collected for every permanent and long-term migrant.

Data from the sample is used to estimate the characteristics of the full population.

Published counts

The only actual (non-sampled) counts regularly published by Stats NZ are totals by passenger type and direction (ie total visitor arrivals, total New Zealand resident departures, etc), and statistics for permanent and long-term migrants.

All other statistics published for short-term travellers are derived from a sample of records. This is true even when a field is available for all passengers (for example country of residence for visitor arrivals). This avoids confusion by publishing actual counts for a field in some instances, but sampled counts for the same field if it is cross-tabulated with another field only available for a sample of passengers.

Sampling ratio

Within each passenger type and direction, one in every k passengers is selected for the sample, where k is the sample ratio. Until June 2011, the sample ratios were changed every month to adjust for changes in the number of passengers, so were higher in summer than in winter. From July 2011 to July 2016, the sample ratios were kept the same every month:

• Resident arrivals: 1 in 26
• Visitor arrivals: 1 in 16
• Resident departures: 1 in 20
• Visitor departures: 1 in 26

From August 2016:

• Resident arrivals: sample weights can be 0, 1, or 20. Resident arrivals are matched to their previous departure to gather information. Depending on the sample status and passenger type of the previous journey, as well as the type of variable, the sample ratio will vary.
• Visitor arrivals: sample ratio 1 in 16
• Resident departures: sample ratio 1 in 20
• Visitor departures: sample weights can be 0, 1, or 16. Visitor departures are matched to their previous arrival to gather information. Depending on the sample status and passenger type of the previous journey, as well as the type of variable, the sample ratio will vary.

Resident departure records are selected for the sample simply by choosing every kth record processed for each passenger type and direction.

For visitor arrivals, records selected for the sample are the kth record processed for each country of residence. This ensures that the country totals derived from a sample will be close to the actual totals.

Counts from the sample of records are rated up by the sample ratio to estimate actual counts.

Sample error

Sample error is the difference between the sample estimate and the actual figure.

When the actual figure is small, the error from sampling can often be large as a percentage of this figure. When the actual figure is large, the error from sampling will usually be small as a percentage of the actual figure.

Stats NZ does not highlight totals or differences under 500 because of the potentially large percentage sample error.

Absolute sampling error can be calculated using the following equation:

Relative sampling error gives a percentage measure of the magnitude of the error. It can be calculated using the following equation:

Sample error example

Suppose that in a particular month, there were 1,000 visitors from Brazil (population) of whom 100 (cell size) visited New Zealand to visit their friends or relatives. In this situation, the absolute sampling error is 76, which means that the true number of people arriving from Brazil for this particular purpose, at the 95 percent confidence level, could fall between 24 and 176.

International travel and migration records are collected from all New Zealand airports and seaports handling international movements.

New Zealand port is available as a data variable, as is territorial authority of residence (captured from address responses on arrival and departure cards) for some passenger types.

New methodology and changes related to the new International Travel and Migration processing system

New methodology and system processes include:

• more automated passenger type classification rules
• greater use of passenger travel history
• greater use of previous passenger type classifications
• imputation of 'country of residence' for overseas visitor arrivals (from citizenship and port)
• move from sampled to full coverage of some variables for visitor departures and resident arrivals, where they were matched to previous movements
• introduction of some new variables for visitor departures and resident arrivals where they were matched to previous movements.

Note: Changes in rules used to determine passenger type have been minimised as much as possible to maintain the comparability in the total passenger movements over time. There have been no changes in the variables captured for permanent and long-term travellers.

Impacts of the methodology and system changes

The following impacts are seen from the changes in the methodology and processing system:

• less manual processing of records
• improved accuracy of automatic passenger type classification
• less 'not stated' 'country of residence' for visitor arrivals
• better coverage available for visitor departures 'country of residence' using matching to previous journeys
• new variables ('travel purpose' and 'length of stay') available for visitor departures using matching to previous journeys
• better coverage available for resident arrivals 'length of absence' using matching to previous journeys
• new variables ('country of main destination' and 'territorial authority') available for resident arrivals using matching to previous journeys.

Changes seen in the data because of methodology and system changes

The following changes in the ITM data are related to changes in methodology:

• Decrease in ‘not stated’ responses for visitor arrivals by country of residence – due to the introduction of new imputation methodology using citizenship and port information.
• New series – due to the use of matching to previous journeys (eg. travel purpose for visitor departures, territorial authority area for resident arrivals).
• Increased accuracy of ‘length of stay’ for visitor departures – as departures can be matched to the visitor’s arrival and calculated, a useful comparison to reported intended length of stay on the arrival card.
• Increased accuracy of ‘length of absence’ for resident arrivals – as arrivals can be matched to the resident’s departure and calculated, a useful comparison to reported intended length of absence on the departure card.
• Increased coverage for some variables – due to the use of matching to previous journeys we can get a more comprehensive set of responses, rather than relying on sampling (eg. previously 1 in 26 visitor departures ‘country of residence’ were sampled, now all visitor departures ‘country of residence’ are captured when matched to their previous arrival).
• Increased sample volatility for some variables – due to different procedures for dealing with manual sample changes compared to the previous system (eg. when passenger type is changed on review, from its automated class).
• Increased ‘not stated’ responses for sampled resident departure variables (eg. ‘country of main destination’) – due to the use of travel history to automate passenger type assignment. Although a departing international traveller may have answered the departure card as if they were a visitor to NZ (eg. not provided information on purpose and country of destination), our automated rules may look at their travel history and determine that for ITM purposes we would class them as a resident of NZ.

Please note that some of the changes may create discrepancies in time series available (particularly with capturing variables from matches to previous journeys and moving from sampled to full coverage). For example Infoshare series on visitor departures by 'country of residence' used sample counts prior to August 2016 and actual counts from matched visitor arrivals from August 2016.

Methodology for determining the NZ-location information in short-term NZ-resident arrival records

The geographic location of short-term NZ-resident arrivals is determined by a process that accesses integrated records of NZ-residents’ unique travel histories (sourced from NZ Customs Service) and address notification histories in the Stats NZ IDI (address_notification table compiled by Stats NZ IDI).

From integration of NZ-residents’ travel histories and IDI address notifications the addresses with notification dates closest to the arrival dates are selected as the NZ location. Short-term NZ-resident arrivals may have a recorded NZ location from a previous short-term overseas trip, and this is regarded as a valid NZ location when a subsequent movement for the traveller has not been linkable to the IDI.

Disclaimer

The results in this collection are not official statistics They have been created for research purposes from the Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI), managed by Stats NZ.

Access to the anonymised data used in this study was provided by Stats NZ under the security and confidentiality provisions of the Statistics Act 1975. Only people authorised by the Statistics Act 1975 are allowed to see data about a particular person, household, business, or organisation, and the results in this collection have been confidentialised to protect these groups from identification and to keep their data safe.

Careful consideration has been given to the privacy, security, and confidentiality issues associated with using administrative and survey data in the IDI. Further detail can be found in the Privacy impact assessment for the Integrated Data Infrastructure available from www.stats.govt.nz.