Hey! You wanna come to New Zealand? It is a great place to visit! Please come on over – we would be delighted to see you. But there is just one thing. We are slightly short on workers right now, so how about… you change your own sheets? We’ll give you a discount on your nightly fee, so – what’s not to like?
Not long ago, I remember that Stuart Nash, Minister of Tourism, wanted to target only ‘high quality’ tourists… by which he presumably meant no more bus loads of Chinese tourists, no backpackers, or anyone in fact who wanted to do New Zealand on the cheap.
This idea hasn’t aged well. Jacinda has been in Europe and now Australia, determined to push the message that we are ‘open for business’. Our tourism sector, which was once our biggest export earner, is back, ready to welcome tourists again with open arms.
Just one teensy weensy little detail, Jacinda. It ain’t true.
Some New Zealand hotels are offering guests discounts or vouchers to service their own rooms because staff from overseas are in such short supply. And hospitality industry leaders say unless more overseas workers can be found promptly, the countries risks reputational damage. “There is a severe shortage of entry-level hotel workers in New Zealand and especially so in Queenstown,” Hotel Council Aotearoa strategic director James Doolan said. “The reasons stem from Covid, because in the first 12 months following border closures, the overnight accommodation sector lost more than half of its workforce.”
He said some hotels had reduced cleaning from daily to once every three days. Others had closed services such as spas or cut back on dining and room service.
NZ Herald
Nothing like a luxury experience, is there?
In my student days, when I worked in a hotel, I found American tourists in particular very demanding. They didn’t do anything for themselves, but they were prepared to spend money on laundry services, room service and they would tip handsomely if the service was particularly good. Right now, they won’t like New Zealand one bit.
And let’s be honest, that is not the only issue.
Let’s imagine you are a tourist from Europe. English is not your first language, but you speak it reasonably well. You want to see some of the wonderful scenery you have heard about in New Zealand. It will be the trip of a lifetime. But it is a very long way to travel, so it is very expensive and you have to allow quite a bit of time.
You board an Emirates flight in Europe, have a brief stopover in Dubai and then disembark in Sydney for a few days. There, you see the wonders of the Harbour Bridge and the fabulous Opera House, take a train to the Blue Mountains, then finish off with a trip to Melbourne and a visit to the Twelve Apostles. You have a wonderful time, but New Zealand is going to be even better!
You then board an Air New Zealand flight in Sydney, bound for Auckland. The paperwork to get into New Zealand is a nightmare because they still have COVID restrictions, and for the first time on the entire trip, masks are required on the plane.
But the real fun is about to begin.
We boarded our Air New Zealand plane and on came the safety video. Now having flown on a modicum of Qantas flights I have a pretty strong stomach for your usual sort of virtue-signalling preening. But nothing prepared me for the Air NZ video that came on.
The whole safety video was presented through the lens of the Maori creation myth – you know, the purported beginning of the earth and all that. So with a bit of ‘how to fasten your seat belt’ instructions intermingled throughout we learnt about how Xenu sought out the volcanoes and how the immortal spirits ‘thetans’ helped bring humans into existence. Wait. Sorry. That’s Scientology. My mistake.
No, it was all the Maori creationist mythology. But really, would anyone sit through the Scientology bumpf? Would a modern corporation push, say, even Christian creation beliefs on paying customers? To ask is to answer. And yet this Maori mythology is what was rammed down our passenger throats, or ears.
Spectator Australia
Hmmm. Okay, but you have a mild interest in Maori culture, and you are definitely going to visit Rotorua, one of the main centres of Maoridom.
You had a 3-day stay in Rotorua planned, but you left after one day. The thermal areas were good, but the motel was full of homeless people who kept you awake all night. There were drugged residents, brawls and fights going on and a lot of screeching tyres with locals doing burnouts. Taupo streets were full of patched individuals, and there was a gang shooting in Auckland overnight. But the Desert Road beckons, and then the South Island… that has got to be better.
All the TV programmes, including the news bulletins, are spoken in some weird pidgin language that you cannot understand. Local people always speak English, but the TV and radio programmes are undecipherable. You narrowly avoided being accosted by a drunken lout in central Wellington when you went to try out the bar scene.
Museums and tourist centres sometimes have notices in Maori only, so you have no idea what they say. You start to worry that you will miss some important instruction because you don’t speak the language here. And finally, when you arrive at your hotel in Queenstown, the bar is permanently closed and the hotel receptionist asks you if you wouldn’t mind changing your own sheets. At this point, you wish you had spent more time in Australia, and you will tell all your family and friends back home to give this hell hole a very wide berth.
How clueless is it for our prime minister to be out and about in the world advertising that!
Australia needs to wheel out its old tourism campaign asking – “Where the bloody hell are ya?” and aim it at tourists who have come to New Zealand and are dying to leave. It will be a huge success and Qantas will make a fortune flying people out of New Zealand with a safety video that they will all be able to understand, in the language that is no longer spoken in the Land of the Long White Cloud.
Ka Kite Ano New Zealand tourism. Go fly a kite.
