Household spending › Recreation and culture
Flights and Accommodation: what NZ households spend per week
What this category covers
Travel bought as a combined product, where the fare and the accommodation are not separable in what the household paid. The category appears from the 2016 survey onward and replaced part of the older package holidays classification.
What it does not cover
Flights bought on their own are passenger transport services. Accommodation booked on its own is accommodation services. Meals and activities on the trip are their own categories.
Those boundaries are set by the survey's own classification, not by us. They matter because a figure read against the wrong definition is worse than no figure: it looks precise and it answers a different question. If you are comparing your own spending against this page, check the exclusions above first.
How to read the figure
Under one household in a hundred records anything here, so the figure is suppressed on this page and only the trend is shown. The important point is definitional rather than numerical: this category and the discontinued package holidays line describe overlapping things in different survey years, so total holiday spending cannot be traced cleanly across all six surveys.
Every survey year
The Household Economic Survey runs every three years. This is flights and accommodation in each survey since 2016, for all New Zealand households.
Read the two money columns together. The published column is the money of each survey year itself, so comparing 2007 with 2023 across it compares two different dollars. The adjusted column restates every year in 2026.06 dollars using the Recreation and culture CPI series, which is the column to use for a real change. That adjustment is our arithmetic, not a Stats NZ statistic.
The reporting column is the share of surveyed households that recorded any spending in this category at all: the lower it is, the further the average sits from what a household that does spend here actually pays.
| Survey | Published per week | In 2026.06 dollars | Sampling error | Households reporting | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | $2.30 | $2.94 | ±80% | 0.4% | — |
| 2019 | $7.60 | $9.62 | ±56% | 1.2% | +230% |
| 2023 | $1.60 | $1.73 | ±55.8% | 0.6% | -79% |
Flights and Accommodation over time
Each bar is one survey, restated in 2026.06 dollars so the six are comparable. In real terms, spending on flights and accommodation has moved down 41 per cent since 2016. In the money of the day it went from $2.30 to $1.60 a week, and most of that difference is prices rather than behaviour, which is exactly why the chart is drawn on the adjusted figures.
$0$15.61
The dark line with a cap at each end shows the sampling error Stats NZ publishes with that figure: the survey is confident the true value lies within it. A long line means a less certain number. Bars in a pale fill are survey years whose sampling error is above the level at which this site normally withholds a figure. They are drawn here because the direction of a series is worth seeing even where the level is not reliable enough to quote, and the table above gives the error on each one.
By household size
Household size explains more of the variation in most categories than anything else on this page.
Every figure in this breakdown has a sampling error too large to report reliably, so nothing is shown. That usually means few surveyed households reported spending in this category.
By region
The survey groups the country into five broad regions rather than cities, so Auckland is a region and Hamilton is part of the rest of the North Island.
Every figure in this breakdown has a sampling error too large to report reliably, so nothing is shown. That usually means few surveyed households reported spending in this category.
By tenure
Whether a household owns or rents correlates with age, income and household composition, so a difference here is not caused by tenure alone.
Every figure in this breakdown has a sampling error too large to report reliably, so nothing is shown. That usually means few surveyed households reported spending in this category.
By household income
Deciles split households into ten equal groups from lowest income to highest. A category that barely changes from decile 1 to decile 10 is close to a necessity.
Every figure in this breakdown has a sampling error too large to report reliably, so nothing is shown. That usually means few surveyed households reported spending in this category.
The rest of recreation and culture
These are the other components of the same top-level category. They add up, with this one, to the total on the Recreation and culture page.
- Computers and TVs
- Boats and Major Equipment
- Sports, Toys and Pets
- Streaming, Gyms and Events
- Books, News and Stationery
- Accommodation
Related calculators
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page is from the Stats NZ Household Economic Survey, retrieved through the Aotearoa Data Explorer, for survey years 2007 to 2023. Inflation adjustments use the Stats NZ Consumers Price Index to the 2026.06 quarter. Stats NZ data is used with attribution; the survey figures are theirs and the adjustments are ours.
Household Economic Survey figures are averages of weekly household expenditure and carry the sampling errors shown. They are averages rather than medians, so they are pulled upward by the highest spenders. Figures are rounded as published.