While more than 5000 people were able to secure a room in Monday’s first round of MIQ’s virtual lobby and queue, there’s no certainty for the tens of thousands who missed out when the lobby opens again next week
The new MIQ booking system may be the great leveller.
Everyone who joined the lobby before being let into the queue was arbitrarily assigned a place in the queue, whether they were the phantom holidaymakers implied to make up the numbers in the Prime Minister’s press stand-ups, or members of Parliament tasked with representing New Zealand overseas.
Greens co-leader James Shaw, set to be New Zealand’s delegate at the COP26 climate change conference in Glasgow this November, logged on to find 15,000 people ahead of him in the queue - halfway through a queue that at its peak reached 31,800.
Although Shaw said earlier this week that if he doesn’t get a spot he won’t be going, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern intimated on Tuesday that Shaw and potentially his group of 14 staff will have bookings secured for them.
She took pains to point out that this wasn’t an emergency allocation. “We will work to find a way to secure a small number of places,” she said.
Shaw will be the second minister to travel abroad to represent New Zealand since the MIQ system was implemented, after Trade Minister Damien O’Connor travelled to Europe and the United Kingdom in June.
But in the group booking put forward by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) for Shaw and the 14 other delegates, only one was able to land a spot. “We’re in the pool, we’ll see how it goes,” Shaw said.
Since his comments, it has been confirmed that the Government will be using its special allocation category to secure preferential space for Shaw and his entourage.
But for the rest, snagging a room at the moment is like rolling a die with thousands of sides.
For many of the people trying to get in or out of the country, it has become a months-long battle with a seemingly uncaring bureaucratic system.
But it's not just the system that doesn’t care - online comments wondering why people are travelling during a pandemic have become more and more common. In part they have been fuelled by the tone of messaging from the government ministers and public servants in charge of MIQ.
Ardern wondered aloud about how December rooms were snatched first, and Joint Head of MIQ Megan Main has neared on patronising pointing out the obvious with some of her statements.
“There is not an unlimited number of MIQ rooms, and there’s a good reason for that - we’re in the middle of a global pandemic and we need to keep New Zealand safe,” she said on the announcement of the virtual lobby system, as if Kiwis who continue to be trapped overseas may have missed the memo on this whole Covid business.
The public discourse has painted many MIQ hopefuls as holidaymakers returning from a jaunt to somewhere sunnier. As is so often the case, the reality is infinitely more nuanced.
The near 30,000 people in the queue on Monday morning represent a wide range of people, all brought together by one shared quality - for whatever reason, they are willing to pay over three grand and spend two weeks twiddling thumbs in the confines of a hotel room in order to cross the border.
There may be a wealthy minority in there who are just looking for a sojourn over Christmas and New Year, but most of these people have serious - often tragic - reasons to travel.
Like travel consultant Mike Moore, who is trying to get to his family in the UK to be with them after the untimely loss of his brother.
By dint of being a relatively small, remote and wealthy country, New Zealand has long had a large population of its citizens living in other parts of the world. Although many of them came home during the first months of the pandemic, for many it wasn’t as easy as just throwing in the towel. Split families, bankruptcies and failed businesses were all potential consequences for some people taking the offramp from their lives and coming back to Aotearoa. But as the pandemic drags on past the 18-month mark, some of these Kiwis are finding their stamina tested and home is calling.
As is the case for equestrian photographer Libby Law, who has been living and working in Europe. With a visa that expires in November, she has limited options about where she can go - especially given her own home country takes a lottery win to get back into.
She said she had absolutely no faith in the MIQ booking system, although there were some quality of life improvements bundled in with the new update - namely, the fact that when you log in and see 15,000 users ahead of you, at least your hopes are dashed without too much delay.
“I still think it is a very messy system, but after spending a bit of time on the old one where absolutely nothing was available at all, at least this was only three hours of checking,” she said.
She said the most concerning thing was that she would soon need to get back, whether she wants to or not.
“It’s not just that I want to get home,” she said. “As soon as my visa expires it is illegal for me to be here, and I will no longer have medical travel insurance once it expires and it is impossible to extend my current cover due to the fact I am outside of New Zealand.”
All Law can do now is wait for the next lobby and cross her fingers as she joins.
“For now, I await the next episode of the MIQ booking game to see if I get lucky,” she said.
And she won’t have to wait long.
Megan Main confirmed after all of the room vouchers were snatched up on Monday that more were on the way before the end of the month.
“There will be another large release of a few thousand vouchers early next week and there may also be another smaller one later this week,” she said.
People who managed to get their hands on a voucher on Monday morning have two days to confirm flight details and lock them in - if they fail to do so, the vouchers will become free again, and presumably go up for grabs in this smaller tranche later in the week.
“I know many thousands of people missed out on vouchers in today’s release,” she said. “I want to reassure people that there are still several thousand vouchers still to be released through to the end of the year. They will get other chances.”
But for the MIQ hopefuls - both overseas and already in-country - all they can do is hope that luck is on their side when it comes time to roll the dice and log in.
