It was refreshing to read Martin Snedden's piece in Wednesday's Herald on the plans to modify visa restrictions for visitors from China.
Good on you Martin. At last, someone in the tourism "establishment" who is prepared to publicly admit the truth about what has happened in this valuable market sector since the implementation of the Approved Destination Status scheme for Chinese tour groups, the only one of its kind for any country that are our major tourist visitor markets.
Snedden's honest words "shopping consortiums have effectively gained control over the arrangements and payments for the majority of these tours, restricting yields and undermining the quality of the visitor experience" could not be closer to the reality of what the scheme has produced for the Chinese visitor sector. Whilst it has resulted in "tidying up" some of the operators in this sector, the overall result is that it has delivered a worse New Zealand experience for these visitors than they otherwise might be receiving if there was a level playing field.
Rigid and inflexible edicts by the office charged with administering the scheme here in New Zealand, particularly in the area of transport, has seen these groups at the mercy of some operators whose only purpose is to fleece their customers of as much of their money as possible, as cheaply as possible and who have little interest in providing a quality visitor experience for their customers.
Where once these groups would have been carried in large, purpose-built, luxury tour coaches in comfort and safety, driven by experienced, professional, uniformed drivers, many Chinese groups are now crammed like sardines into smaller shuttle-bus type vehicles, loaded down with luggage and shopping packages to the point of being dangerous, directly due to the vehicle age restrictions placed on transport operators as part of the scheme's conditions of service.
