A perfect place for a photo. However, there are very few tourists for now.

“It’s usually quiet for us in the winter,” says Betty Perkins, owner of the Million Dollar Cruise, who has been organizing boat tours on Queenstown lake for 13 years. “But it’s not quiet.”

It is left behind Queenstown – usually one of New Zealand’s most iconic attractions – fighting.

Personal toll

All this means that thousands of people are already unemployed.

Boult says the town was taken to one of the poorest of New Zealand’s richest.

“People are concerned about their jobs, their ability to provide their families, and their ability to pay their mortgages and rents,” said the mayor.

“At the end of the day, almost every business in the region depends on a version of tourism.”

Perkins is one of the lucky ones – he has his own business and has little staff and little burden, which means they don’t have to leave anyone. Still, he estimates that his business’s income is 70% lower than usual.

“We’ll just have to make progress, we’ll wait for Australia to come,” he says.

There is a similar situation for Dong Wang, who runs a small dumpling cart by the lake. He has only one income for his family, but his income has fallen from around $ 200 New Zealand ($ 130) a day to just $ 50.

“There’s nothing I can do,” says Wang, who comes from China but lives permanently in New Zealand. “It is very difficult to find a job. That’s why I continue.”

A worker from a Queenstown souvenir shop, who came from China six months ago and wasn’t named for fear of retaliation, says he is about to be made unnecessary. If he cannot find another job, he may have to return to China.

The council provides assistance with food vouchers, medical aid, public service payments, and even warm clothing, but Boult believes that the problem of unemployed migrant workers is “a humanitarian crisis in construction.”

Attracting tourists

During the last holiday weekend, businesses reported seeing an explosion when people from all over the country landed in town.

However, Boult says businesses cannot “survive” only in domestic travelers. She hopes that the Trans-Tasman balloon will run by July for the ski season, where Australians account for 30-40% of customers.

“This is really making or breaking,” he added, adding that if there is no trans-Tasman bubble until July, more businesses will fail and more jobs will be lost.

Boult believes that Queenstown will never return to pre-Covid tourism levels in terms of number of arrivals, and is looking at ways the city can be diversified, including whether it can go to education, film and medical tourism.

Simon Milne, a professor of tourism at Auckland University of Technology, says all predictions should be made with a salt grain. But Queenstown, a place where most of the economy is based on tourism, says it will be much more affected than other parts of New Zealand.

Still, the current situation is not bad for those who can visit Queenstown.

Canadian Anna Wilhelmus and Kristy Caldwell were in Queenstown during a visit Friday. They are based in Christchurch for half a year abroad, but decided to come down to explore the area.

“It’s good that everything has ourselves,” says Caldwell.