With summer coming to an end, many of New Zealand's tourist hotspots are seeing a sudden drop-off in the domestic visitors that have sustained them throughout the Covid-19 pandemic.
It's hit particularly hard in five South Island regions - Kaikōura, Queenstown, Mackenzie, Aoaraki Mount Cook, Fiordland and South Westland.
In Kaikōura, people once flew around the world to experience the coastal town's landscape, wildlife and adventure, but these days tourism operators are doing it tough.
Many of the businesses were already doing it tough even before the pandemic began, though, buried in debt after a long struggle to overcome the Kaikōura earthquake.
But while many businesses got a rise from domestic tourism, Cooper's Catch Fish n Chips owner Jason Hill described the drop off since the summer holidays as "like a tap turning off".
"February's normally peak summer and we were rostering it like a winter, and if you look around now, there's no one around," he told 1 NEWS.
But the Government says it is listening to the woes from locals in Kaikōura, with Tourism Minister Stuart Nash in the town yesterday to reopen a $13 billion fund to help councils build tourism infrastructure like public toilets.
"When you're spending taxpayers money — and keeping in mind in the tourism sector alone we've spent $400 million, let alone the $1.8 billion in the wage subsidy — we've got to make sure that we get it right," he said.
However, tour operators are now heading into an uncertain winter, with the O'Connors keeping their kyaking business open, but right now it barely covers their costs.
"We’re down about 80-something per cent which is crazy," Seal Kayak Kaikōura's Levi O'Connor said.
"There's a lot of depression out there at the moment and I could see why it would be so easy to get down to those depths, but you just got to keep your head up."
He's trying to focus on the good for their four-month-old.
"I guess just waking up and just being thankful for what we have."
SHARE ME