Celebrity Eclipse cruise ship. Photo / Thomas Bywater
OPINION
Hang your head in shame Christchurch.
Because I am absolutely appalled that the first cruise ship passengers to arrive in Lyttelton in more than a decade are being forced to pay US$30 or NZ$51.30 each to ride in a cruddy old ex-public transport bus if they want to travel from Lyttelton to Christchurch.
That’s what passengers on the first large cruise ship to visit Lyttelton in more than 10 years had to pay yesterday for return travel from the portside town to Christchurch’s CBD.
Another ship carrying 2600 passengers arrives today. Is this the best way to welcome people to Canterbury? Of course it’s not!
Not surprisingly, some of the nearly 3000 people on board the Celebrity Eclipse which docked yesterday morning thought the same, and didn’t bother leaving Lyttelton.
They told Newstalk ZB that they thought $51.30 was too much and so they gave Christchurch a miss.
They left last night. The next ship arrives today. More people to rip off.
If I owned a business in the city and I’d been hanging out for these cruise ships to start arriving again, I would be gutted that this is the way we are welcoming people to Canterbury.
That we aren’t doing everything we possibly can to get people through the Lyttelton tunnel and into town. Instead, we’re expecting these people to pay $51.30 each to travel in an old public transport bus.
You know the ones I’m talking about. The old Red Bus buses that have obviously been sold to a private operator, painted over in random colours, no branding on them - Lord knows what they’re like on the inside.
It’s your classic “loser cruiser”. Except, in this instance, it’s the cruisers who are the losers. The ones who are prepared to pay this ridiculous fee, anyway.
But it’s us who are the bigger losers. Our local businesses, the people who work for those businesses - and everyone else who benefits from a thriving city.
I get that travelling costs money. And if you’ve been anywhere in the world, you’ll know that if you’re a tourist you pretty much have to pay money just to breathe.
But this is different. Very different. Because this is a region - and a country - where the tourism sector is on its knees after nearly three years of Covid.
And Canterbury, in particular, is a region still recovering from the devastation of the earthquakes. Not just the physical and mental devastation - but the economic devastation too.
Because one of the things that came to a grinding halt after the earthquakes was cruise ship visits to Lyttelton.
So what did we do? We thought big. We spent $67 million building New Zealand’s first-ever purpose-built cruise ship facility at Lyttelton. We backed ourselves.
Just like the businesses that hung in there, as much as they could, with their eye on the day when the ships would come back and we’d welcome thousands of people to Lyttelton and Christchurch and Canterbury once again.
We shared the dream that one day we’d get back to how things were and that we’d have people from all over the world pouring into the city and the region again.
And yesterday, that day arrived. And what did we do? After all that hope and all that investment, we made it as difficult as possible for the people on the ship to get into the city.
We put up a barrier. We thought we’d fleece these people we’ve been waiting years for. People we desperately need to visit and support our shops and our cafes and our other attractions.
And if the Christchurch City Council or its tourism agency ChristchurchNZ tries to tell us that they have no control over what these visitors are being expected to pay to travel on these cruddy old buses from Lyttelton to town and back, and if they say the price was set by the cruise ship companies and it had nothing to do with them - I’ll be telling them that they have missed the boat big time on this one.
Because if they really have the city and region’s best interests at heart, they need to be coming to the party and putting on as many free buses as it takes to get as many of these cruise ship passengers into town.
That’s why I’m saying today that Christchurch needs to hang its head in shame. Because, at this rate, greed is going to be a bigger threat to our tourism sector than Covid ever was.
OPINION: New Zealander reflects on delivering speech at St James' Palace.