Fiji Hotel and Tourism Association, 27 August 2026 – A column ran in these pages recently arguing that Fiji’s tourism industry is trapped in a cycle of dependency, living off taxpayer subsidy, underpaying landowners, dodging its environmental obligations and lobbying for relief rather than fixing itself. It was confidently written and dressed up in the language of structural economics. It was also wrong on almost every substantive point, and worth correcting on the public record.
Let us start with the claim that tourism enjoys a free ride on public infrastructure while taxpayers foot the bill. Anyone actually working in this sector knows the opposite is closer to the truth. Hotels and tour operators already pay twelve and a half percent VAT, a two-hundred-dollar departure tax on every outbound visitor, and from September this year a new five per cent Tourism Services Tax on turnover above two million dollars, a levy Parliament has just passed as part of the 2026-2027 Budget and which Government itself expects to raise around seventy million dollars for Fiji Airways. Add those together, and the effective tax load on tourism services sits well above twenty per cent before a single cent of council rates, work permits, environmental fees, liquor and other licensing fees, duty, import, wages, and training costs are counted.
This is not an industry that has escaped its obligations to the public purse. It is one of the more heavily taxed sectors in the country, and it has been here before. Before the pandemic, prescribed tourism services carried VAT, a service turnover tax and an Environment and Climate Adaptation Levy stacked on top of each other, pushing the combined rate close to twenty-five per cent. Government’s own baseline assessment for the National Sustainable Tourism Framework found that this combined burden eroded margins so severely that reinvestment stalled and resorts fell into disrepair.
That is the actual lesson of recent history: overtax this sector and the product itself deteriorates. It is not evidence of a free ride; it is evidence of the opposite.
There was also a swipe at the national ambition to reach 1.25 million visitors and four billion dollars in annual earnings, framed as reckless volume chasing at the industry’s own insistence. It is worth being clear about where that target actually comes from. It is a whole-of-Government aspiration, developed with Tourism Fiji and the Ministry of Tourism and Civil Aviation as part of national economic planning, not a wish list drawn up by general industry.
Tourism already underpins close to forty per cent of Fiji’s GDP and supports well over one hundred thousand jobs directly and indirectly, according to figures from the Ministry of Finance and the Fiji Bureau of Statistics. Earnings for 2025 alone came in at close to 2.8 billion dollars. A sector carrying that much of the national economy on its back is not a monoculture problem to be dismantled. It is critical infrastructure in its own right, and the honest conversation to have is about the mix of visitors within that growth, not whether growth itself is legitimate. FHTA has said publicly and repeatedly that Fiji should be building toward higher-value, longer-stay travellers rather than pure arrival numbers, which makes it an odd target for a column arguing the industry refuses to think beyond volume.
The suggestion that hospitality has failed to invest in its own infrastructure autonomy does not survive contact with what is actually happening on the ground either. Resorts across the country, including remote and off-grid properties in the Yasawas, have spent the past year fitting solar arrays and battery storage specifically to reduce their dependence on diesel and, by extension, on the public grid. One recently completed island project alone installed more than 1,700 solar panels and eight battery units, cutting diesel use by roughly half this year with a target of seventy to seventy-five percent by the end of 2027. Tourism Fiji has put solar on its own headquarters. Individual resorts have done the same from Sonaisali to Malolo. None of this was forced by regulation. It happened because operators recognised that energy security is now a competitiveness issue, and because Government’s own tax incentives, including full capital expenditure write-offs for renewable energy investment, made the economics work eventually. Calling this sector passive on infrastructure ignores the projects already switched on – often at far greater costs because supportive policy took a long time to kick in.
Then there is the figure quoted for what landowners receive from resort developments, pitched at a flat six per cent of unimproved land value. That figure is real, but it belongs to agricultural leases issued under the Agricultural Landlord and Tenant Act, the legislation that governs cane and market garden land, not tourism development.
Commercial and tourism leases issued by the iTaukei Land Trust Board operate on a different and openly negotiated basis. Documented case studies of resort leases on iTaukei land show landowners receiving an annual percentage of unimproved value plus a separate, fixed share of the venture’s actual turnover, reviewed periodically rather than fixed forever. TLTB has publicly confirmed that tourism leases provide some of the highest land tenure payments to landowners, with premium payments and annual rentals from tourism projects far exceeding other lease categories.
Resorts and hotels generate significant revenue streams that enable investors to pay higher lease rates, with developers often required to provide substantial upfront premiums to secure land tenure. Ongoing annual rental payments are structured to reflect the profitability of tourism operations, ensuring sustained and long-term benefits for landowners, while the wider community gains additional advantages through contributions to education funds, infrastructure development, and employment opportunities.
On the accusation that the workforce is treated as disposable and undertrained, the record again tells a different story. Fiji National University’s College of Business, Hospitality and Tourism Studies runs more than twenty technical and vocational programmes feeding directly into this sector, from culinary arts and front office operations to hotel management, alongside an apprenticeship scheme built specifically so operators can grow their own skilled staff rather than import it. Individual properties run their own graduate and supervisory pipelines on top of that. Wages and retention remain a genuine industry challenge, and we work hard in the background to ensure we are consistently lifting our skills to ensure we can continue to compete with a professional workforce that remains in high demand by our close neighbours.
The notion that sustainability is merely a marketing ploy rather than a guiding principle for operations no longer holds true unless you really do not understand what is happening in the industry. Fiji has a national target of ninety per cent renewable electricity generation, and hotels are among the businesses building toward it, not waiting for it. That is before counting water treatment upgrades, waste reduction programmes, marine protection efforts and the growing number of properties pursuing recognised sustainability certification with full-time sustainability staff making the changes because international travel buyers are actively pursuing these efforts. None of this is because the industry suddenly discovered its conscience. It is because guests, particularly in the higher-value segments this sector prefers, now book on the strength of it. Treating environmental performance as core business logic is not a hypothetical recommendation for tourism. It is already how a growing share of this sector operates.
As for the charge that tourism only shows up in public policy debates to complain after budgets are read, FHTA’s own record contradicts that too. This organisation has made formal submissions on VAT settings, turnover tax structures and investment incentives well before budget day, not after it, and has done the same on legislation ranging from the Commercial Use of Marine Areas Bill, the Review of the Liquor Act, the Security Industries Act, The Tourism Act, the Civil Aviation Bill, and the Consumer Commission Bill, engaging with clause-level detail rather than press-release outrage. Government’s own five-year National Sustainable Tourism Framework was built with direct industry input into its baseline data. That is exactly the kind of white paper and data-driven engagement the sector is consistently supporting, and it has been happening quietly and consistently for years.
None of this is to say the sector has nothing to improve. Economic leakage through imported inputs is a real and worthwhile conversation. Fiji’s agricultural sector does not yet produce at the scale, consistency or specification that many resort kitchens require year-round, and closing that gap will take investment on both sides, not just a directive to hotels to buy local. We’ve been raising exactly this with agricultural bodies and with members directly, because a stronger domestic supply chain is good for hotels’ margins as much as it is good for farmers’ incomes and the Fijian economy at large.
Balance sheet resilience also matters, and operators know it better than most, having lived through a pandemic that emptied every property in the country overnight and left highly leveraged businesses with nothing to absorb the shock. Government’s own tax settings, including the incentives that made recent renewable energy investment viable, have played a part in helping operators rebuild more sustainably capitalised balance sheets since. There is more work to do there, and no one in this industry would claim otherwise.
High-value, lower-impact tourism is also a sound aspiration, and Fiji should be having a serious ongoing conversation about the visitor mix it wants for the next few decades, the room categories it builds and where, and the destinations it markets to achieve that. That conversation is already underway inside the industry and with Government, and it deserves to be treated as such rather than reduced to a caricature of an industry that only knows how to chase numbers. But unless you are also part of these conversations, you don’t know till you ask.
There is a difference between constructive criticism grounded in how this industry actually operates and a column built on borrowed statistics and a misapplied land rent formula, dressed up as structural analysis. The author of that piece is, by his own description, a highly credentialled meteorologist, and Fiji is better off for having experts of that calibre examining our weather systems and climate risk. But forecasting a cyclone and understanding hotel lease economics, tax incidence and destination marketing are different disciplines entirely, and expertise in one does not transfer to the other simply because both involve reading data. Staying in a resort for a holiday no more qualifies someone to critique its balance sheet than eating a good meal qualifies a diner to run the kitchen. Both experiences are valuable. Neither is a substitute for actually working the trade or feeling the pain first-hand.
Fiji’s tourism industry is not asking for sympathy, nor does it hide from scrutiny, and because we’re used to asking the hard questions, we have no issues answering them either. It already carries one of the heavier tax loads in the economy; it is investing in its own power and water resilience faster than most sectors; it is training its own workforce through structured pathways, and it engages Government with position papers rather than placards. The industry welcomes genuine debate about how to build a more resilient, higher-value, better-distributed tourism economy, because that conversation matters and Fiji cannot afford to get it wrong. What it does not need is a critique that gets the basic facts wrong while lecturing the sector on rigour.
Tourism remains the largest single contributor to Fiji’s economy, underpinning close to forty per cent of GDP and well over one hundred thousand jobs, according to Government’s own figures. An industry carrying that weight deserves scrutiny built on accurate evidence, not borrowed authority from an unrelated field. This industry is always ready for that conversation. On the facts. Every time.
Fantasha Lockington – CEO, FHTA (Published in the Fiji Times on 27 August 2026)
Fiji Hotel and Tourism Association
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