The second Gay Ski Week has been declared a success, with the tourism industry gearing up to worship at the altar of the pink dollar god. Destination Queenstown, who provided $10,000 worth of seed funding for Gay Ski Week, says the tapping of the lucrative gay tourism market has only begun. "Our long-term strategy is to attract visitors that spend more, stay longer and arrive in our shoulder seasons and so if there is a market, as there is in this case with the gay sector, then we'll go for it,” says chief executive David Kennedy. Ski Week organiser Mike Sanford says the gay tourism sector is underestimated in this country. He says the economic benefits of Gay Ski Week are distributed around businesses throughout the South Island as not all gay people travelling to the event have bottomless budgets. The Christchurch Press says the “gay community is loved by marketing executives around the world because they are less likely to have children but earn more and so have more disposable cash”. Gay advocacy groups have long been concerned about the prevalence of this damaging stereotype. Economist Lee Badgett shattered the “double income no kids” myth when studying Census and general social survey data in the United States, discovering that gay men actually earned up to 28% less on average than their heterosexual counterparts.
Credit: GayNZ.com News Staff
First published: Tuesday, 14th September 2004 - 12:00pm