Too Many People Are Going to New Zealand
I&#x27;ve been travelling on a road trip in NZ for the last month or so (with a few more weeks to go).  Even now, tail end of the summer season, the country is packed.<p>I like to drive around with just a rough route, see a place I like and stop for a while, but that just hasn&#x27;t been possible if I want somewhere comfortable to sleep. Motels are mostly very small (6-12 rooms) so there&#x27;s not a lot of availability. I&#x27;ve had to book in advance (and have a super-flexible route, skipping some full towns and even regions) to be able to get anything at all.<p>There&#x27;s chronic under-investment in hotels and motels. It doesn&#x27;t look like much (outside the cities) has been built since the 60&#x27;s and 70&#x27;s.  It&#x27;s like if the US never built Holiday Inn Expresses, Hampton Inns and so on and was just relying on mom-and-pop downtown motels to house everybody, or if there were no Premier Inns in the UK and it was still just seaside B&amp;B&#x27;s.<p>That does give what little accommodation there is more character with a more personal service, but it&#x27;s still mostly poor quality and a tiny number of rooms.  With some motels (luckily a minority) it&#x27;s been clear that the near 100% occupancy all the time means they just don&#x27;t care, somebody will rent the room however bad it is.<p>I don&#x27;t think it would be much different with a motorhome or camping, official campsites look full and unofficial campsites are everywhere (and many of those campers do trash the place, giving campers and tourists a bad name and building some real dislike of them in the country).<p>There are also a few high-profile cases of tourists driving on the wrong side of the road (or just badly) and causing accidents and deaths.<p>The growing (and very understandable) anti-tourist feeling in NZ should correct the problem in the long run, as tourists feel less welcome and tell their friends that.<p>It would have been better if the government funding for attracting people to NZ (too fast) had instead been spent on infrastructure (including help with building brand-new motels).