Joy, actually: happy reunions fill Auckland airport as trans-Tasman bubble begins | New Zealand | The Guardian
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Joy, actually: happy reunions fill Auckland airport as trans-Tasman bubble begins. Emotional scenes in arrivals hall as hundreds of travellers touch down on first day of quarantine-free travel from Australia
Lisa Tetai warned her son not to take a sick day when he picked her up from Auckland airport. “I thought there might be media there,” she explains.She wasn’t wrong.As she stepped into the arrivals hall on Monday afternoon, Tetai, like hundreds of others who travelled to New Zealand on the first day of what has been dubbed the trans-Tasman travel “bubble” with Australia, was swamped; a flash of cameras, journalists buzzing with anticipation, then, pushing through the crowd, the people she had actually come to see. Cue tears.
“I was supposed to be here for a funeral,” she said. “My uncle was admitted to hospital and I booked the earliest ticket I could get. He didn’t make it. They had the funeral last week, but I wanted to see my son and my grandson.
“I’ve got family all over the North Island and before the pandemic I came back four or five times a year. It has been really, really hard.”
It happened over and over again. Steph Wood was already crying when she walked into the cacophony. So too was her mother, Narelle. Wood had hoped to be back for Christmas last year, but a Covid outbreak in her home city of Sydney delayed the beginning of the long-mooted quarantine exemption for Australian arrivals.
When it was finally announced two weeks ago, she didn’t waste time.
“It was just like, I need to be here as soon as I possibly can,” she said. “I haven’t been back since 2019, I have been counting down the days.”
Narelle was mostly speechless: “It’s just too good to have her back.”
So it went all afternoon. A never-ending stream of emotional airport scenes, as though someone had organised a mass re-enactment of Love Actually’s opening montage. It was hard not to be moved. Not only by the reunions but also by the deep link these two island nations share
Both Auckland airport and the airlines supplying the flights had put a lot of work into manufacturing this media moment – an acoustic band played the same Dave Dobbyn song on repeat all afternoon (Welcome home / I bid you welcome / I bid you welcome) and Jetstar served champagne in the departures lounge – possibly a budget airline world-first – before the first flight to leave Sydney.And for good reason. Monday might have been a day for reunions but there is a lot riding on the bubble. The pandemic has decimated both airlines and the tourism industry. According to Tourism Australia, 8,000 international visitors came in January – a 99% decrease from the year before.For both countries, pulling visitors from across the ditch is a crucial lifeline, particularly as lagging vaccine rollouts have forced politicians to warn other international travel may be some time off.
While the New Zealand prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, said on Monday that her government was exploring options for travel bubbles with other Covid-free nations in the Pacific, it would not look further afield. Similarly, the Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison said on Sunday that Australia was “in no hurry to open those borders” to other countries.
The questions is whether, after the initial flurry of reunions, the bubble between these two countries will offer a genuine economic boon for devastated tourism industries.Pre-Covid, Australians made up about 40% of the international visitors to New Zealand and spent $2.7bn in 2019. New Zealanders spent almost the same amount – $2.6bn in 2019, although Australia’s larger tourism market meant they only made up about 15% of visitors there. Perhaps aware of the political risks to welcoming Australians if there were to be an outbreak – a new poll by Research New Zealand for RNZ found 22% of New Zealanders were on the fence about the bubble and 28% were against an opening – Ardern has warned the high probability of fresh Covid-19 outbreaks meant the travel bubble could be burst at any moment.
Indeed, new arrivals on Monday were warned they could be forced into quarantine in the event of an outbreak. But despite the tough stance, Ardern also seemed to get swept up in the enthusiasm on Monday, saying she was personally experiencing some of the excitement that had greeted the travel bubble. “I, like many New Zealanders, have friends and family in Australia,” she said, including some who were “desperate to return to New Zealand”.
“I know how enthusiastically this has been greeted and I’m really pleased about that,” she said. “It is truly exciting to be able to welcome our Tasman cousins quarantine-free to Aotearoa.”Still, that level of uncertainty could mean that many holiday-makers will delay trips while they wait to see how it unfolds. Tourism NZ acknowledges this, saying its scenario modelling showed it could take until January 2022 for Australia to reach 80% recovery to pre-Covid 19 levels.
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