A Comparative Assessment of Tourism Industry Outcomes in Australia and New Zealand During COVID-19 Pandemic

This paper presents a qualitative comparative assessment of the Australian and New Zealand tourism industry performance following the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis focuses on a qualitative evaluation of achievements in several key tourism aggregates from 2020 to 2021 and compares them with industry achievements in 2019. The assessment reveals that following the COVID-19 pandemic, by 2020, the shares of tourism output and export earnings plunged to 6.0 and 1.6 percent, respectively, in Australia. In New Zealand, tourism output and earnings contracted to 8.8 and 9.4 percent, respectively. The overall economic contractions in both countries were more severe in 2020-2021 than in 2019. It is anticipated that the contribution of tourism to national output, employment, export earnings, and hotel occupancy rates will continue to remain subdued in 2022, with the likelihood of some degree of recovery in late 2022, assuming rapid progress in vaccinations against the COVID-19 disease. This study makes a new contribution to the tourism literature, as the assessment presented here provides a comparative, distinctive analysis of the pandemic's effects on the local economic contexts of two neighboring, similar economies of Australia and New Zealand. Research has been lacking in providing this type of analysis, despite the numerous studies addressing the effects of the pandemic across the global tourism industry.