Jobs on the line

Tens of thousands of jobs are on the line as travel cancellations mount and tourism businesses anxiously await details of Government assistance.

Efforts to prevent the spread of Covid-19 require all incoming overseas passengers to selfisolate for 14 days and all cruise ship visits have been halted.

The tourism industry directly and indirectly employs almost 400,000 people, or just over 14 per cent of the workforce.

Tourism Industry Aotearoa (TIA) chief executive Chris Roberts said we could see largescale job losses, with a return to previous international arrival levels taking as long as two years.

‘‘The severity of this is something we have never seen before. It’s far more severe than the global financial crisis (GFC) and there were hundreds of tourism businesses that went under during the GFC . . . so that could happen again.

‘‘We’re talking tens of thousands of jobs at risk and the Government’s business support package will be about mitigating those job losses as much as possible by keeping people employed.’’

Yesterday, Hospitality NZ chief executive Julie White was told of 1000 possible redundancies in bars, cafes and hotels and she said that was just the start.

‘‘If you think about all the departure lounges at airports, what business will they have now? Hotels are bleeding, they’re getting hundreds of cancellations a day.’’

Infometrics senior economist Brad Olsen said tourism businesses were spread all over the country but certain regions were much more exposed to the Covid-19 downturn.

According to Infometrics modelling, in March 2019 the highest concentrations of tourism jobs were in Otago – where 29,000 people, or 23 per cent of the local workforce, were employed in tourism – and the West Coast, where a similar proportion represented 3600 jobs.

Although only 7.3 per cent of the Auckland workforce was focused on tourism, that was still 66,000 jobs out of 900,000, Olsen said. In Wellington and Canterbury, tourism employment was about 8 per cent.