Last resort: Tourism ‘suffering badly’

• Date: 24 June 2021
• Published date: 24 June 2021
• Publication title: Taupo Weekender

One hotel says demand for staff is running at unprecedented levels while at Mt Ruapehu ski-fields warn that without urgent Government action parts of the slopes may not open this season.

While some operations are short by scores of staff both Kiwis and from overseas, Ruapehu Alpine Lifts (RAL) says difficulties getting just one highly specialised grooming machine driver from Sweden into the country could affect its operations on two ski fields.

Taupō, with its central location attractive to a surprisingly strong surge in domestic tourism, recovered quickly after last year’s April/May lockdown.

Tracey Poole, Hilton Taupō hotel manager, says the property hasn’t seen an early winter for bookings like this for a decade. It is having to go through temp agencies to plug workforce gaps and there are still vacancies and not enough locals to fill them.

“‘We’re suffering badly from it. There is a huge shortage right across the country.” In a town of just on 20,000, and plenty of other tourist businesses competing for staff, there’s not enough local candidates and Kiwis are less willing to work in the hotel sector than those workers form overseas.

“We have less opportunity to recruit locally and we have relied hugely in those busier times on working visa holders. We need as many as we can get.” And she points out the requirement to pay the median wage of $25.50 an hour to visa holders from overseas was distorting the wages throughout businesses which had Kiwis doing equivalent roles on lower rates.

At RAL, chief executive Jono Dean says the situation is dire.

He said there simply weren’t New Zealanders who could do some jobs and not worth training them up for just a few months work, such as a groomer operator who was licensed to winch a $500,000 machine around ski-fields at Whakapapa and Turoa.

”That’s the nature of our industry. It would be like training an apprentice builder and telling them they can only work in summer,” says Dean.

‘We literally need one person and that application with Immigration has been in since March of this year — it’s a deplorable length of time. It twill have a significant impact on the terrain we can operate — it means we can’t open parts of the resort.”

Throughout the country the picture is the same in the industry that pre-pandemic vied with dairy to be the country’s biggest foreign exchange earner, based on businesses which shed tens of thousands of jobs a year ago which are now struggling to find staff to fill vacancies, estimated at...