Queenstown tourist operators need an exact date for quarantine-free travel with Australia so they can ramp back up after cutting staff and services in the wake of Covid-19 and the closed border, a local industry group says.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has announced an agreement with Australia for a travel bubble in the first quarter of next year, assuming there are no material changes in either country's Covid-19 status.
The exact date for rolling out the welcome mat is yet to be decided. Australia's cabinet still needs to sign off on the plan, arrangements are being made to keep arriving Australians separate from other passengers, and airlines need some notice to fire back up grounded planes and furloughed staff.
Craig Douglas from the Queenstown Chamber of Commerce told Checkpoint it is the best news in a long time, but they are going to need more detail.
Australians' contribution to Queenstown's tourism industry is second only to New Zealanders, he said, and businesses will need perhaps six weeks' notice to prepare for the arrival of Australian visitors.
He said many organisations have reduced staffing and they need time to increase capacity again.
"It the hint of a Christmas present really. There's a lot of water to go under the bridge yet to understand what that actually means for people being able to travel.
"Businesses need more certainty around the timeframes that we're talking about from an announcement to the reality of actually occurring.
"What are the logistics that are going to be required for people to be able to travel? The industry needs time to react and respond.
"Confidence is a difficult thing to have at the moment. We need more certainty around a lot of issues, but this is some of the best news we've had in some time.
"Most of the businesses have responded by downsizing, and there's a lot of capacity missing out of our offer here in Queenstown and across New Zealand's tourism offer generally.
"It doesn't come back overnight. It takes time to recruit staff, takes time to find staff, it's very difficult at times to find the right staff. Then they've got to be trained, businesses have got to be provisioned."
There are a lot of logistical questions that need answering for trans-Tasman travel and international tourism to operate again in New Zealand, and Douglas said it would be better those questions were answered sooner rather than later.
"Six weeks would probably be a good target to know that you can prepare, organise your business get the appropriate staff employed. That's going to be a challenge because in the tourism industry there's a lot of migrant staff that are no longer here, that form a lot of the resource pool that businesses use to deliver volume. We need some weeks to respond."
Australian Health Minister Greg Hunt said the federal government welcomes a New Zealand travel bubble, calling it the "second half of the equation".
He said it is the first step on a return to international normality, and an agreement would be easy to reach as some Australian states have already welcomed New Zealand travellers.
