I was surprised to find that there is monthly data on the number of international visitor arrivals to New Zealand going back to March 1923. It’s not often I get to work with 100 year time-series, so I made a couple of charts.
It took until 1973 for annual arrivals to reach a quarter of a million visitors. From that point on, arrivals doubled every about decade, reaching 0.5 million in 1983, 1 million in 1992, and 2 million in 2002. Growth was slower for the next decade, taking until 2015 to reach 3 million annual visitors. The next few years then saw rapid growth, reaching a peak of 3.9 million in 2019, before being disrupted by covid. In the latest 12 months to July 2024, arrivals were back up to 3.2 million.
The second chart shows the magnitude of the disruption caused by covid, on a century scale.
PS: I’ve started using embedded PDFs for data visualisations instead of images. The quality is better and it works well on Linkedin. I’ve created a custom template using Quarto and Typst to put charts generated by ggplot in a nicely-formatted PDF document. I’ll write up a post on that soon.