The Department of Conservation's (DOC) systems for counting visitors and activities at 700 sites on public conservation land are old and plagued by delays, and data loss and backlogs.

Its counters are also mostly installed underground and have to be checked manually by staff to download the data.

Now the department is asking companies what type of automated system it could replace it with, paid for out of the international visitor levy.

A document for a tender that closed on Friday showed officials were particularly interested in AI and cameras among other things.

"The current Activity Counter System ... faces end-to-end challenges across hardware, firmware, data flow, and verification, resulting in inconsistent data and operational inefficiencies," said the document.

"Manual processes dominate downloading and validation, causing delays, data loss, and backlog."

Added to this were hardware inconsistencies, while a lack of telemetry prevented real-time monitoring.

"Fragmented reporting limits stakeholder access to timely insights."

'It makes sense'

DOC wants a new system to help it analyse visitors' activities, and be easy to install and reliable in some tough environments and not stick out too much visually.

Minister Tama Potaka said better information on visitor numbers and patterns would help with deciding where facilities, funding and staff were most needed.

"Nature is our most important economic asset and underpins our tourism industry, so it makes sense to use International Visitor Levy ... funding to invest in technology that supports visitation while protecting the environment," said Potaka in a statement to RNZ.

On AI's role, the department said a tender participant had asked about if DOC was open to higher AI capability.

"The department expects that some high-value sites will have multiple monitoring technologies in place to serve multiple use cases," it told RNZ.

Visitor counting was the basic use case; if more high tech could be added to get more uses then it wanted to hear from firms how this would function.

"We'll evaluate the proposals and consider where AI could add value."

The international visitor levy collected through the border control system is $100 a person.

Other charges

As for a new charge to visit top nature spots for international visitors, DOC said the earliest this could come in was next summer 2027-28.

It depended on the progress of legislation, the Conservation Amendment Bill, that had passed its first reading.

"No decisions have been made on how much the charges will be, and this will be set via regulations," DOC told RNZ on Friday.

The talk has been of a charge of $20-$40 at Milford Sound, Aoraki Mount Cook, Mautohe Cathedral Cove and Tongariro Alpine Crossing, which DOC papers said could raise over $60 million a year.

In the process of amending conservation law to take a more commercial-development bent, DOC looked at three different potential approaches including charging all visitors the same whether New Zealanders or from overseas, charging everyone but charging locals less, and charging only international visitors.

Though the government finally landed on this third option, papers showed DOC's initial recommendation was to have maximum flexibility to charge both NZers and international visitors, such as by introducing a "parks pass".

That would have raised the most money and been simplest, papers said.

But most submitters on the Conservation Amendment Bill opposed charging New Zealanders.