8. Report against operating intentions: Recreation and outdoor activities
The Department is moving from a focus on life-cycle management for visitor assets, to looking at how to build up and manage a portfolio of recreation assets and services that will deliver intermediate outcome 6 and the Government’s goals for tourism and economic growth.
By looking at various economic and tourism scenarios, the Department has identified opportunities around the main international and domestic tourism flows and population centres. The destination management plan is reprioritising where recreation assets should be, based on financial modelling and tourism flows, and resources will increasingly be prioritised to increase the Department’s responsiveness to domestic and international visitor flows.
At the same time, the Department is putting in place a national visitor monitoring implementation plan to assess the effectiveness and efficiency of current, unstructured monitoring programmes. Effective monitoring is vital to enable the effectiveness of programmes to be understood, and to inform good
decision-making in the future.
The challenge for the future is to ensure we meet customers’ needs and expectations in priority locations, resulting in more people participating in outdoor activities on public conservation land.