Is May A Good Month To Travel To New Zealand?

Learn whether May can be considered a good month to travel to New Zealand, and if it is not, which months would be better.

May is a month that can be considered low season in New Zealand. It marks the end of autumn and falls just before the beginning of winter in New Zealand.

Because May falls on the border of two seasons, the weather tends to be pretty unpredictable. You should not expect to get lots of sunny days, and the chance of rain and snow increases the further into May you are.

If I had a choice to travel to New Zealand, I would not choose May to do so. While it is one of the best times to travel to New Zealand if you consider the price and availability of accommodation, what you gain in saving money, you lose in enjoying lots of good weather.

This is not to say that it cannot rain or snow during the better months to travel to New Zealand, because it can and often does; or that it is never sunny in May in New Zealand, because it can be as you can see from the included photo, which I shot in May.

I have traveled to New Zealand in May, and did not enjoy my trip as much as I would have enjoyed it had I moved my trip to either a month earlier to April or a month later to June.

In April you can enjoy more of the autumn colors in New Zealand and in June you can enjoy the first fall of snow on the mountains. Snow in New Zealand starts falling at the end of May, in general.

So to wrap up Is May a good month to travel to New Zealand? my answer would be “No”.

If you do not have another option or want to purely visit New Zealand for the peace and quiet and relatively low accommodation prices you can get during May, then I would say “Go for it!”. But if you want to visit New Zealand to see scenery and enjoy the best it has got to offer in relatively good weather, I would suggest choosing a different month. Which month exactly depends on what exactly you want to see and experience, but in general, the months during late spring and early summer are the best.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like…

Similar Posts