When back-country hut fees increased several years ago, I wrote with some disappointment about how I saw hut fees as being the price of being honest. I still think that, but it’s not something up for negotiation right now.

Back then, I also tried to compare the expenditure on maintenance of back-country huts with the revenue from back-country hut tickets. This wasn’t fully possible because a DOC accountant told me that spending between regular back-country huts and Great Walk huts couldn’t be separated, despite the user-pays component of the latter not actually coming from back-country ticket and pass sales.

In other words, the $16.5 million figure for expenditure on “huts” in DOC’s 2009 Annual Report couldn’t be split between two classes of hut which are treated radically differently where maintenance is concerned, and so couldn’t be nicely compared with the user pays revenue streams for those classes of huts. Comparing hut ticket revenue with $16.5 million of expenditure wasn’t very meaningful when the bulk of that spending is probably going to maintenance of huts with user-pays fees sourced elsewhere.

Lately, in April we had a forum conversation on the NZ Tramper website, and this question of comparison came up again. Trying my luck a second time I fired off an Official Information Act request, and this time it seems to have gone to someone much more helpful. I received the exact figures I asked for. I didn’t bother to ask specifically about expenses on Great Walk and similar huts because they don’t interest me as much, but here are the comparisons for regular back-country hut revenue and expenditure for the last few years.
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