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Jock Gilray of Immigration New Zealand opened his presentation at the MEETINGS 2025 conference by stating the aim of Immigration NZ to be a “trusted world class immigration service”.
To achieve this required a dual focus of fast processing times but also quality decisions.
To this aim, Jock pointed out that INZ has been focused “on improving our performance, particularly when it comes to visa processing, and we are seeing success”.
Jock says that in 2024, INZ received nearly 540 000 visa applications, and they approved around 89 per cent. This did not include the nearly 1.6 million approved visitors that did not need a visa as most visitors can travel to New Zealand on an electronic travel authority (NZeTA).
Since then, Jock reports that INZ has continued to focus on improvements and an NZeTA request will be decided within 72 hours – and often much faster. While normal visas took an average of nine working days in 2023, this has been reduced to an average of six working days in 2024; with further improvement in 2025.
“Simply put, last year we did more work (and) we did it faster,” says Jock.
Jock discussed two of the big visa-required markets, China and India.
In 2024, INZ received nearly 260,000 Chinese visa applications compared to 220,000 in 2023. INZ has worked hard to reduce the processing time from an average of eight working days in 2023 to six working days in 2024 and five working days in 2025.
India merited its own section of Jock’s presentation as “there is no escaping the fact that [India is] a complex market”.
Jock pointed to a “significant surge” of low-quality applications received two years ago which led to a decrease in approvals rates and longer processing times.
Since then, the INZ worked hard to educate the Indian market about visitor visa requirements which had led to higher approval rates and faster processing times.
Processing times had dropping from 13 days in 2023 t o nine working days in 2024 with further improvement in 2025..
Additionally, INZ approved 66,000 visitor visas in 2024, more than any year prior to the pandemic.
Jock said INZ had made good progress but that there was much more work to do.
Finally, Jock spoke to the INZ’s commitment to the Business Events Industry.
Last year INZ introduced a dedicated webpage for the events sector: www.immigration.govt.nz/events
The aim of this initiative is to smooth the visa application for business events of 30 people or more. Jock gave two real world examples of groups who used the system.
A three-month warning of a pending event enabled INZ to walk alongside the first group and advised them of the most expedient route forward.
Every single delegate to that event was approved, and because the right information was supplied, the processing was rapid.
In contrast, the second group did not inform INZ of their event. The first INZ knew of it was when INZ officers noted a flood of applications two weeks before the event.
Many of the applications were incomplete, had missing information or the application was for the entirely wrong visa. This resulted in some applicants being late to the event by a number of days.
Jock points out that it is in everyone’s best interest if the visa system is smooth and welcoming to visitors.
This new events system aims to smooth out many of the potential bumps in the visa process and to allow the INZ to walk alongside the event organisers, providing advice and ensuring a smooth visa process.
It is hoped that this will help contribute to New Zealand’s reputation as a competitive and welcoming destination for business events.
