In response to increasing costs to deliver its service, Qualmark, from April 1, will only conduct an initial in-person assessment for new business members — from then on, they’ll be online each year.
And Mountain Scene understands at least one Otago-based assessor, who formerly covered Queenstown, finishes tomorrow after being made redundant.
Till Covid, Queenstowner Amanda Cushen was a Qualmark assessor for 12 years, looking after 220 accommodation properties from Mount Cook south.
‘‘It just sounds like to me they’re dumbing down the whole thing to close it down,’’ she says.
‘‘How the hell is NZ tourism going to keep the quality standards up if we’re not going to have a thorough quality assurance system in place?’’
Cushen says there’s no substitute for regularly visiting accommodation businesses.
‘‘A lot of them rely on their [1 to 5] star rating for international agents to use as a guideline.’’
Once there are only online assessments, she asks, ‘‘how do you know I haven’t five rooms falling apart?’’
‘‘Qualmark reckon they can get honest responses to online assessments every year — it doesn’t work that way.’’ Her husband John Cushen, who assessed adventure tourism for about 10 years, says the personal contact he had with small operators, particularly, was key — as they came to know him they’d open up as to what was going on.
‘‘You were mentoring them, you were an adviser.
‘‘If I’m ticking a box, I want to create an image — you can’t tell me we can now do all that assessing and training sort of thing on a tick-box and a phone call, it’s so sad.’’
Local Air Milford operations manager/chief pilot Ant Sproull says he has no problem with a hybrid model where you got an in-person assessment every second year, but to have them all online, ‘‘I think the quality will hurt’’.
If Qualmark’s funding’s an issue, he suggests it receive a share of the international visitor levy that’s targeted for tourism.
Local Ziptrek Ecotours boss Trent Yeo says ‘‘it’s pretty hard to assess remotely, like, I suppose they just look at paperwork’’.
‘‘I like the idea that people come and visit you, I think it has great merit.’’
On the other hand, ‘‘what I would say is everything in life is costing more, so it’s pretty hard to continue a model where people have to be there all the time’’.
‘‘What I would say is it depends on how good the online system is.’’
