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The rooms in managed isolation have been empty because some desperate returnees have been able to reserve more allocation vouchers than they need.
Photo: Alexia russell
The government is not putting a limit on the number of spaces people can lock up, despite other New Zealanders saying they feel stranded and helpless abroad.
It’s mandatory to reserve a room before flying into the country, and the only people who can get rooms before the end of February must meet strict emergency allocation criteria or take advantage of the very occasional canceled reservation by updating the website.
Immigration attorney Richard Small said the system had been invaded by “desperate people, who behave desperately and just record everything they can see coming up.”
“It’s a lottery. It becomes an accident of being online or having four or five other people taking the lists with you – that’s what we’ve heard as well, people who have helpers constantly monitoring the website and taking everything. what falls out, “he said.
On the assignment website, returnees are instructed to select their preferred dates for managed isolation, which are held for 48 hours while they book the corresponding flights.
To secure their proof of administered isolation, people enter their flight number.
But Small said people have come to realize that you don’t actually need to make a reservation on that flight for the coupon to be issued.
They are holding on to multiple options and I was afraid that people would not cancel unused dates.
It’s something that Waikato travel agent Larissa Dunn had come across as well, including people who wanted a second date as backup in case they missed their flight.
“To me, that’s just another waste of a room. A few weeks ago I had a ladies ring and she had seven different locations in January,” he said.
The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) manages the isolation and since November said that “five to eight rooms” are not used every day because people had booked several coupons or had flights but no coupon.
He said another seven or eight rooms were empty each day because people with coupons had not boarded their flights.
Dee Edge, a New Zealander who describes herself as “absolutely stranded” and defenseless in the UK, said it would be amazing to have one of those rooms vacant this month.
She and her husband flew in to save and sell their Hertfordshire home there after learning that it had been occupied by squatters.
They can’t finalize a sale date until you secure return flights to New Zealand and arrange isolation vouchers, with the UK shutting down preventing you from staying in a hotel.
“It’s just impossible to get anything done … dates just disappear in five to 10 seconds. You’re hiding in nowhere and it’s so daunting. I can’t tell you how many, literally, how many thousands of times I’ve been to that site and refreshed and refreshed all day, “he said.
“It’s very frustrating to know that there are free spots and we can’t get one when we need it. We don’t choose to go back at this point. It’s just the order of the process we go through to sell the house.”
Travel agent Larissa Dunn is among those who also check the website for cancellations, for clients who need to return to the country in a matter of days, not weeks.
He said that up to 10 people a day approached him in increasingly sad and desperate circumstances, including many who found it too stressful to navigate the reservation system themselves.
“This past week we’ve had quite a few family members take their own lives here in New Zealand, so they are desperate to get home to be with the family. That sadly doesn’t fall into the new category of getting an emergency assignment, “he said.
MBIE said it strongly discourages people from booking multiple coupons they don’t need, and frequently contacts people asking them to remove the unwanted coupons.
He said he had blocked some accounts so people couldn’t book any more coupons, while allowing a slight overselling of hotels to allow no-shows, including 31 people on December 19.
It did not say whether it would consider an upper limit on the number of coupons people can reserve.
Martin Small believed that it would not be difficult to do so if returnees had to enter an identifying feature such as their passport number with their reservation.
“That seems like a no-brainer. That should have been in the system architecture from the beginning. They had a month to test this system, during October when it was not mandatory. This should have been resolved,” he added. he said.
He said MBIE would have known that the coupon system would trigger a booking panic.
“Given the millions we are throwing to the border and the billions to Covid, a little extra work on the IT side to give the public the assurance that the voucher system has the highest possible integrity seems like a step. reasonable”.
Motueka travel agent Jeremy Matthews has also been helping people book managed isolation vouchers and said the low-demand system had reached a “tipping point” with “quite a few desperate people.”
He wanted penalties for people who reserved coupons and did not use them.
“If there was a $ 100 fine, people would be incentivized to cancel things that they are not going to use, that is clogging the system and making it really difficult,” he said.
Dee Edge said he also wanted fines introduced or a requirement for people to confirm their reservation of managed isolation 48 hours before their flight.
The government has previously said it will not expand its managed isolation system to serve more people, because “the limitation is not the hotels, but the essential workforce serving returnees.”
