It appears visitors are returning to the Catlins area after the Christchurch earthquakes ''knocked the guts out'' of tourism in the coastal south, as one local tourism operator put it. Hamish MacLean reports.
China is coming to the Catlins, Bruce Kilpatrick says.
The Nugget View and Kaka Point Motels owner says China is origin of the ''big jump'', or demographic shift, he has seen this past season.
Mr Kilpatrick, who has owned the Catlins accommodation for 10 years, had 326 Chinese guests for the month in April, nearly half of their clientele.
His wife, Coral Kilpatrick, said Chinese visitors were drawn to the open spaces, the penguins, the quiet and ''definitely Nugget Point'', where they would often take photographs at the Nuggets at sunset and sunrise.
In the TripAdvisor 2015 Travellers' Choice Awards Top 10 Landmarks in New Zealand, Nugget Point was the No 6 spot: the third consecutive time it has appeared on the annual list.
Clutha Development marketing manager Joanna Lowrey said tourism operators across the district were reporting - and Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment numbers were showing - a longer tourism season this year.
Because the Catlins area straddles the Clutha and Southland border, Statistics New Zealand's commercial accommodation monitor, issued this week, did not capture Catlins-specific data.
However, guest night monitoring painted a positive picture for Southland, which had a 10.9% increase in visitors in April, including 9510 international visitors, a 5.1% increase.
In April, 8202 guests checked in to Clutha accommodation, a 7.7% decrease from last year, but there were 2801 international visitors, a 4.7% increase.
Mrs Lowrey said the rebound in the Catlins tourism sector was because of several factors: tourism New Zealand's growing awareness of Clutha's tourism operators, the growth in visitor numbers throughout New Zealand, and the return of travellers through Christchurch.
The Catlins relied on ''self-driving'' international visitors who had been to New Zealand before and were driving a circuit looking for ''more'' after arriving in Dunedin, or Queenstown, but ''especially at Christchurch'', Mrs Lowrey said.
Guest nights in Canterbury rose to 296,498 this April, an increase of 5.7%.
The region had 123,739 international guests check in, a 6.6% increase.
Mrs Lowrey said, two years ago, before the establishment of Clutha as a regional tourism organisation, travel agents had limited knowledge of the tourism-based businesses in the area.
''Maybe 80% to 90% of every [travel] agent I met, the line that came out was, 'There's just nothing down there. We just send our clients to Dunedin or Invercargill'.''
That is changing.
Over the past year, guest nights spent in the district rose 3.8% to 80,390.
The average length of stay rose from 1.52 nights to 1.64 nights.
Mr Kilpatrick hosted five Tourism New Zealand officials representing Australia, China, Malaysia, and Wellington in April, the first time the district had had such a delegation, Mrs Lowery said.
And the good work continues.
Tourism New Zealand trade development manager Paul Trowell would be in the district next week to run a workshop with at least 15 tourism operators from Clutha.
