'Nothing has changed': Tourism operators fed up with staffing crisis

Back in June, tourism hotspot Queenstown made national headlines when the school holidays hit and the town experienced levels of tourism that were close to pre-COVID levels. After two years of closures from the pandemic you’d think it was a positive headline, but in reality tourists were greeted by a resort town that was packed to the brim and seemingly closed for business. 

Staff shortages were so severe, tourism and hospitality operators were forced to stop trading and close their doors because they simply couldn’t find workers. In fact, economist Benje Paterson estimated the Queenstown business community missed out on $3 million of revenue in the month of June alone because of the closures.

The government heard the concerns from operators and put measures in place to help the sector. However, as Queenstown heads into its busy summer season, operators are saying nothing has changed. Some organisations are still being forced to close and delays on visa processing mean most businesses face a summer with understaffed teams that are at breaking point.

“We currently have 40 vacancies to fill this summer,” said Roman Lee-Lo, hotel manager at luxury hotel The Rees. “We continue to pay well above both the minimum and living wage but are still struggling to attract the people we need to allow us to open all of the hotel and we continue to cap our occupancy levels to ensure we don’t compromise our standards of service.”

The Rees currently has around 30 work visa applications, including internships still awaiting processing – a situation most operators we spoke to related to. Most of Lee-Lo’s applications were for start dates in July, August, and September but he has been given no indication of when they will be processed.

“We are hopeful these visas will be issued by the end of November to allow for travel time to New Zealand and induction and training before the busy festive season kicks off in late December,” Lee-Lo said.

Local newspaper The Mountain Scene reported that Sky City Queenstown Casino boss Jono Browne is expecting he will have to close his restaurant seven days a week due to staff shortages. He told the paper that he’d had overseas staff lined up for three to four months but still can’t get them here due to the slowness of the immigration process and called COVID “a walk in the park compared to what’s going on now”.

Hamish Klein, chief manager operations at Good Group Hospitality, which operates venues in Queenstown, Auckland, Sydney and Melbourne, said the company is concentrating its efforts on bringing staff over from the Australian market. Recently the decision was made to fly over three chefs from the Sydney venue to fill gaps in its Queenstown kitchens.

Klein told HRD in August that while they had experienced staff shortages in Australia, their government had been much quicker to react and some relief was now being felt over there, but there was no such relief for his Queenstown venues. Klein said a major setback for the company’s recruitment process is government enforced market testing – the process the NZ government makes companies go through to ensure they can’t get a Kiwi to fill the role over an immigrant. A noble idea in some industries, but with very few Kiwis eager to work in hospitality he said the process is a waste of time.

“We shouldn’t have to go through the process of justifying why a New Zealander isn’t fit for a role or waiting for the stand-down period to allow New Zealanders to apply while we have others overseas, we want to bring immediately,” Klein said. “Nothing’s changed in Queenstown. Our venues are still only open five days because we haven’t got enough staff.”

Klein said he was hoping that closing his venues two days a week would be a very short-term thing when HRD spoke to him in August.

When we spoke to the CEO of The Rees, Mark Rose, he was working dishwashing shifts at the hotel to fill the staff shortage gaps, something that Lee-Lo said continues to happen now. “With over 40 vacancies to fill this summer, Mark and the entire executive team continue to be hands-on to ensure our service standards are upheld,” he said.

Rachel Rose, HR manager at tourism company Southern Discoveries said she was pleased to work for a medium-sized company that had HR resources that put them in a better position than the majority of tourism businesses in Queenstown that are small operators without a dedicated HR function.

“We’ve basically been recruiting non-stop, constantly at a steady pace for about four months now,” said Rose, but despite the heavy recruitment drive one-third of the positions available four months ago remain unfilled. 

The staffing crisis might be the most immediate problem for businesses, but right behind that problem looms a potentially bigger crisis: there’s no worker accommodation in the region, so when those visas finally get processed, there’s not going to be anywhere for them to live.

Rose said that Southern Discoveries was lucky to have accommodation available to their Milford Sound employees and urged larger employers to think about what they can offer in terms of accommodation. She praised general manager of the Novotel, Jim Moore, for a recent deal he brokered with a Queenstown backpacker accommodation provider that will provide accommodation for Novotel staff over summer.

“Staffing is one issue we are facing, but this is exacerbated by the lack of and expense of finding accommodation in Queenstown, once we have these new team members visas,” Lee-Lo said. “I am unsure that we have an accommodation shortage in Queenstown, rather that we have over 2,000 homes and rooms on short term rental sites in our district – this is an issue that needs to be urgently addressed by both our council and government.”