Tourism is not an IP-intensive service in the same way as software (see Study 1) or audiovisual production (see Study 2). Its IP dependence is more indirect. The service depends on place, culture, reputation and trust, and those values are shaped by trade marks, copyright, traditional knowledge and digital platform control. That makes tourism a useful test of how far New Zealand’s trade policy sees the service layer and the IP layer together.

1. Tourism in New Zealand’s economy

Tourism sits close to the surface of the New Zealand economy, but the value it creates is distributed across accommodation, food, booking, transport, branding and cultural experience. The data shows that accommodation and food services rely heavily on trade marks and confidentiality agreements, with relatively little use of patents.^[1] Indeed, tourism operators are not inventing new technology so much as shaping an experience, protecting a brand and keeping operating methods and data private.

The sector is dominated by trade marks because tourism is a brand business. Hotels, restaurants and tour operators sell reputation as much as they sell service. Confidentiality agreements are also prominent because operating procedures, supplier lists and pricing structures are commercially sensitive. Patents are marginal, which is consistent with a service sector that curates experiences rather than inventing products.

The time series reinforces the same point. Trade marks and confidentiality agreements are persistent across the period, while patents remain low. This resembles the commercial logic under which tourism operators compete by building trust, signalling quality and protecting the data and methods that keep a service distinctive.

1.1 Related sectors in the tourism value chain

Tourism services are delivered through a chain that extends beyond accommodation and food. Transport, reservation support, and back-office intermediation all contribute to the same final service.

The comparison makes the related-sector point clear. Transport/postal has the highest no-protection share (55.4%), accommodation and food also has a high no-protection share (39.7%), while administrative/support sits lower (34.5%) but still above software-intensive sectors. Across all three, confidentiality remains the most stable formal strategy. This supports reading tourism as a cross-sector service bundle rather than as a single standalone activity.

2. What the IP–Services Toolkit shows

The IP–Services Toolkit shows tourism and travel related services as a cluster built around experience, intermediation and place. The most distinctive connection is to traditional knowledge. For instance, much of the value of tourism in New Zealand rests on Māori cultural knowledge, customary practice and identity. Trade marks and geographical indications support brand and origin claims; computer programs support booking and reservation systems; creative expressions support destination marketing and performance; and traditional cultural expressions sit close to the centre of the tourism offer.

3. Interface Layers

3.1 Traditional knowledge, cultural expressions and the tourism product

Tourism in New Zealand often sells access to culture as much as access to landscape. Kapa haka, whakairo, pounamu and mātauranga Māori can all form part of the tourism experience.^[2] That makes traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions central to the sector, but the policy problem here is broader than a simple copyright gap. Traditional knowledge is often place-based, relational, transmitted through custodial systems and frequently uncodified.^[3] Read that way, tourism is not only consuming cultural content; it is drawing value from an ongoing innovation system that sits partly outside standard private-rights IP categories.

This is where the familiar asymmetry appears. Copyright protects original expression by an identified author, trade marks protect source-signalling, and geographical indications protect certain origin claims for goods. None of these mechanisms, by themselves, gives full effect to community authority over inherited knowledge, ritual use, or conditions of culturally appropriate transmission.^[4] The result is that tourism products can monetise Māori cultural knowledge while legal control over downstream re-use and contextual integrity remains fragmented.^[5]

At the same time, New Zealand has developed some unique approaches to managing these challenges. Protective tools include offensiveness tests and advisory pathways in parts of the IP system. Internationally, disclosure-of-origin rules can also help reduce misappropriation.^[6] These steps matter, but they still do not fully resolve the tension between open market access and community authority over cultural inputs.

An enabling approach works differently. It treats Māori people not only as affected communities but as rights-holders and market participants who may use collective branding, licensing structures and controlled commercial partnerships where these fit tikanga and community priorities.^[7] This does not replace protective safeguards, it sits alongside them.

That distinction matters because tourism services are open under New Zealand's GATS schedule.^[8] A foreign travel operator can establish a tour product, book customers and supply services cross-border without services-side limitations in the schedule itself. The core issue is therefore not market access alone, but how legal and institutional settings allocate authority over the cultural inputs that make the service valuable, especially when those service originate from abroad.

3.2 Trade marks, geographical indications and destination branding

Tourism also depends on place-based branding. New Zealand's destination image is built through campaigns, marks and regional stories. Legally, trade marks are strong source-identifiers: they allow owners to exclude confusing third-party use, and they reduce consumer search costs.^[9] But they are still private signs tied to commercial origin. They do not, by themselves, protect the wider social meaning of place, culture, or community authority over destination narratives.^[10]

Geographical indications are narrower again. Under the TRIPS Agreement, GI protection is framed around goods whose qualities or reputation are linked to geographical origin, with enhanced treatment for wines and spirits.^[11] That structure helps in sectors such as wine tourism, but it does not map well onto the broader tourism service bundle, where the core product is an experience rather than a single origin-linked good. In New Zealand practice, this creates a familiar gap between legal protection for origin labels and legal protection for service authenticity claims.^[12]

For that reason, destination branding is governed by a legal mix rather than a single IP right: trade mark law for source-signalling, GI law for qualifying goods-origin names, consumer protection rules for misleading market claims, and contract/licensing terms for commercial control. This mix is workable, but it is not equivalent to a comprehensive legal framework for protecting the full cultural and relational value of place in tourism markets.^[13]

3.3 Online travel platforms, data and algorithmic dependency

Tourism services are now mediated by online travel agencies, booking platforms and review sites. Those systems are software-heavy and data-heavy. This shifts both market power and practical enforcement from state actors towards private intermediaries that control discovery, ranking and access.^[14] In legal terms, the stack includes copyright in software and curated content, contractual control over platform participation, and protection of commercially valuable undisclosed information (including algorithmic logic and operational know-how).^[15]

This creates a structural dependency problem. The more tourism operators rely on external platforms, the more value shifts to the platform layer through commissions, data capture and ranking control. The service may be open to supply under GATS, but the practical route to the customer is conditioned by private governance rules backed by IP and contract. The dynamic is similar to what appears in Study 1, but here it operates through distribution and intermediation rather than through direct software-service supply.

For New Zealand tourism exporters, the mirror problem appears abroad. Even where travel services are open in principle, offshore platform terms, destination-specific brand enforcement settings, and different treatment of data and cultural content can shape discoverability, pricing power and appropriation risk for New Zealand-origin offerings.^[16] In practice, outward market access depends on how destination legal and platform systems treat the intangible value embedded in the service.

In this setting, the more immediate issue is not a standalone database right but data access and interoperability. Tourism operators can invest heavily in local content, itineraries and destination data, yet still capture little of the durable value when platforms control sharing terms, ranking visibility and downstream reuse. In formal trade terms, supply may be open; in commercial terms, control over discovery, repeat demand and data feedback often sits with the platform. The result is a persistent gap between nominal market access and practical market power.

4. Takeaway

Tourism is one of New Zealand's most open service sectors, but the openness sits beside a deep dependence on cultural knowledge, brand equity and platform infrastructure. That is why the sector belongs in the study of IP and services together. The service can be supplied freely, yet still depend on assets that ordinary IP law only partly protects and that services commitments do not, by themselves, allocate as cultural authority.

The cross-border implication is two-way: New Zealand’s schedule openness conditions inbound suppliers, while New Zealand tourism suppliers abroad face destination-market platform and IP settings that can narrow practical export opportunity.

For the broader argument, the point is simple. In tourism the IP layer does not block the service outright; it shapes what the service can credibly be. That makes the sector a clean example of indirect linkage, and it is the reason this study belongs beside the more direct linkage cases in computer and audiovisual services.