Inside a headline-making MIQ hotel getting back on its fit
What’s it like staying at the infamous Jet Park Hotel now that it’s back in business? Sapeer Mayron went to find out.
T‘People are willing to forgive a facility because of the extraordinary circumstances the country found itself in.’ DR MIKE LEE
he gates are open. The barbed wire is coming down. There are no military officers to be seen. At the Jet Park Hotel, just minutes away from Auckland’s international airport, guests are finally showing up of their own volition. Last week I was one of them.
For more than two years, the 221-room hotel was a managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) facility, not only for those coming through the border but also for locals who caught Covid-19 early on in the Delta outbreak in 2021.
If you’ve also been curious about what was behind the tall fences all that time, you’re actually welcome to pop in and visit. ‘‘You don’t have to eat, you don’t have to stay the night, just come and take a look if you’re curious,’’ Angelique van der Merwe, group sales and marketing manager said.
Jet Park made news throughout the pandemic not only because it was among the first hotels the government contracted to convert into an MIQ facility, but because of what went on there.
More often than not, guests were Covidpositive. Some were moved to Jet Park from other MIQ sites, so all the patients were together.
And from August 2021, people who tested positive in their own homes but weren’t able to safely isolate themselves were invited – but often taken – to Jet Park to see out their quarantine and get treatment if they needed it.
Sonja Herrmann, group HR manager and director of sustainability and community projects, said staff went to all kinds of lengths to make people comfortable, even when they desperately wanted to be at home instead. But there is no escaping the fact that for some time, in some people’s minds, Jet Park was known as being closer to a prison than paradise.
Hotel staff are proud of what they did – they even have a gallery planned to display all the thank-you notes and art work made for them while they were an MIQ site. The new additions will sit alongside the expensive art that went into storage rather than be subjected to harsh cleaning sprays for two years.
Herrmann is proud to report very few staff left the company during or after the pandemic.
‘‘All of our housekeeping staff are still with us save maybe one. Our entire kitchen team, most of our food and beverage team [stayed], and these are the ones who were on the front line. They were the ones in the PPE 24/7 in those hot zones, they were the ones doing the hardest work.’’
May Heather is the executive housekeeper, and has been with Jet Park almost as long as the hotel has been open: 24 years. She said there was no way the pandemic could have put her off her work.
‘‘During Covid, my passion was to do well,’’ she said. When the Government tasked Jet Park with MIQ, she simply thought: ‘‘That’s us. We hung in there, we worked hard. We enjoy what we do, we’re passionate about it.’’
There was some talk of changing the name as Jet Park bounced back as a normal hotel, but ultimately everyone agreed it would be ‘‘weird’’.
‘‘We stand by what we’ve done, we’re proud of what we’ve done. It’s part of our history, and we don’t want to hide away,’’ Herrmann said.
I’m given a luxurious and spacious room for my night at Jet Park. Immediately
I’m picturing what it might be like knowing these four walls were my home for two weeks straight, and I’m not totally opposed to it. The view from my room looks out over a car park, it’s true. But just beyond the asphalt is Mā ngere Mountain.
There are small details I immediately appreciate. The soaps and lotions are locally made and kawakawa-scented, and there are small woven baskets for rubbish. It’s a lovely room, but not so fancy that I can’t relax.
When I’m shown around the hotel the next morning, I can see that my room was particularly large – definitely space for a stretch and a workout if needed. Some people would have been in what are called ‘‘overnighters’’, designed for those arriving late at night and leaving again early to fly – and certainly less fun for 14 days.
Not everyone went willingly to Jet Park, and some even tried to escape. ‘‘People went through tough times, right,’’ van der Merwe said. ‘‘The last two years have not been great for anyone.’’
A dedicated health team was tasked with not only making regular checks and Covid-19 tests for the guests, but also helping them handle substance abuse problems, including sudden withdrawal brought on by the move to MIQ.
‘‘Our team weren’t really hands-on, but we did work closely with the medical team to find who might have been having a bad day, just by how they answer the phone when we ask for their orders,’’ Herrmann said. ‘‘It’s all about teamwork and communicating with those other agencies who were doing that care.’’
Branding expert and Associate Professor in Marketing Dr Mike Lee says the hotel’s Covid role may work in its favour.
While some MIQ guests might not have anything nice to say about the place, that’s normal and won’t mean much to incoming tourists, Lee said.
‘‘People are willing to forgive a facility because of the extraordinary circumstances the country found itself in. Those attitudes I wouldn’t think would be shared by the hundreds of thousands of tourists who will be coming.’’
Lee said spending precious dollars on renovations instead of rebranding was the right one. Overseas visitors may not know or care about what Jet Park went through over the two years it was a quarantine facility, but the wear and tear on the rooms would have been hard to ignore.
‘‘There is not much benefit denying it or trying to pretend that it wasn’t [an MIQ facility]. Who knows, maybe in 20 years time it will actually be seen as historic moment in their facility – that in 2020, they were used as one of the only places that the NZ government thought was suitable to be an MIQ facility.’’
So who is visiting Jet Park? Van der Merwe says in the two weeks the hotel has been open again, almost all the available rooms have been booked out, and the set of rooms still under renovations should be open before the summer holidays.
Guests are coming from all over the country to stay for a night or two before a big trip overseas. For many, the perks can’t be beaten – free parking for five nights and a free shuttle to the airport.
There are even loyal regulars who were excited to return to Jet Park, and the corporate guests are back too, with the conference centre seeing regular activity already.
Statistics New Zealand reports international arrivals are picking up again since the borders closed overnight in March 2020.
In the year to August 2022, just under 1.3 million people came to New Zealand, and for the past six months the number of monthly arrivals has been gradually growing.
The night I stayed, the hotel was 72% booked. Even with a wing of rooms still under construction, those arrivals figures are proving themselves in the guest book.