Adventure Tourism Safety in New Zealand - A Leap of Faith? | Tourism Industry Blog
New Zealand is well positioned in the world of Adventure Tourism – we are the innovators and leaders of bungy, and have the perfect setting and natural resources to offer a comprehensive range of tourist activities that are land, water and air based.
But every so often we are reminded of it’s risks when a tourist in New Zealand suffers serious injuries or even death by undertaking one of these experiences. Such was the case on Friday in Hanmer Springs where an Australian tourist slipped out of a bungy harness.
Is adventure tourism inherently risky and something tourists should agree to at their own peril? Yes, BUT – there should be safety regulations and regular approval/review processes of commercial adventure tourism operations that aim to eliminate or reduce the risks, that are balanced with the need to attract and effectively cater for thrill seekers. As a backpacker in South America I undertook several adventure tourism activities and recall that asking about safety precautions was not high on my list of key concerns (put that down to youth, being trusting and language barriers), the point being that adventure tourism operators need to be the ones who are concerned and do take the right precautions, training, checking of equipment and conditions etc.
Scarily, over 5 years 29 people have died (and at least 540 seriously injured) in New Zealand adventure tourism activities. I have no doubt that each time this happens the overall New Zealand tourism reputation takes a hit – particularly when it’s occurred under the management and care of a marketed tourism business and not the result of irresponsible behaviour on the part of the tourist. Sure accidents happen when people do things in the outdoors – but severe injury and death are not acceptable outcomes during the course of a paid or chaperoned tourism activity if it was avoidable.
The Department of Labour is currently conducting a detailed gap analysis of risk management and safety provisions in the adventure and outdoor commercial sectors in New Zealand, due to the Minister of Labour by 31 May. We will look forward to seeing the outcomes that will hopefully outline a way forward to prevent these statistics from growing.
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2 thoughts on “Adventure Tourism Safety in New Zealand – A Leap of Faith?”	
I believe it would be wise to introduce a minimum level of qualification needed for someone to secure a job in the Adventure Tourism industry.
I studied Adventure Tourism at NMIT in Nelson where I learned extensively about risk assessment and general health and safety, as well as health and safety specific to a number of different adventure pursuits. I fear that the ‘on the job’ training offered by a lot of adventure tourism operations may not be hitting the mark.
A solid grounding in risk assessment backed up with practical experience should be a pre requisite for any ‘hands on’ job in the adventure tourism industry.
One of the challenges is to get our various industry bodies to work together to share their minimum requirements, benchmarking and even audits. As a small organisation, the audit process is a non-trivial task as we take it seriously and view it as an opportunity to learn and improve best practise. It takes at least half a day to go through and that excludes the preparation time. What does frustrate me is having to answer the same information multiple times for multipe audits. We have our regular annual Audit (for financial and business processes); we have our Maritime Safety Authority audits – often spot checks (safety, crew training and safey procedures); we have our CYFS audit (financial and business processes and of course safety procedures) and we’ve just done our Qualmark audit (financial and business processes, safety, crew training and customer experience). I feel we are audited enough and but I have fears of a knee jerk reaction to both this and the report into the OPC tradgey which will set up yet another industry body to audit us. It would be good if one of these existing organisations, and Qualmark would be a logical one I suspect, to add in a specific category for adventure and outdoor pursuits. And for them to perhaps reduce other areas of their audit when there is evidence that it has already been substantiated.