Sheet shortages and closed cafes: much-anticipated Queensland summer turns into ‘a fizzer’
Summer holidaymakers continue to roll through the glitter strip at Surfers Paradise, even as the Gold Coast’s Omicron outbreak increases. It’s quiet for January, but tourists are still here, wandering between the hotels, the restaurants and the beach.
A few streets back from the surf, the diminished workforce at the Paradise Resort is paddling furiously beneath the surface.
Last week, the resort’s sales and marketing team were cleaning rooms and turning down beds. Reservations staff were making coffees. Human resources employees have been shifted to the kitchen to clean tables.
“There’s no such thing as a normal week at the moment,” says David Brook, the general manager of the Paradise Resort.
In December, as tourism businesses on the Gold Coast prepared for the New South Wales-Queensland border reopening, bookings were strong. Brook says about 96% of available rooms were reserved.
We’ve lost so many businesses and we will continue to until these conditions improve
Patricia O’Callaghan
Cancellations due to the Omicron outbreak mean the hotel is only at about three-quarters capacity; most of the cancelled rooms have been shut off, due to staffing concerns. There are now more than 21,000 Covid cases on the Gold Coast, in addition to thousands more close contacts required to isolate, and the city’s tourism workforce has been seriously affected.
“We’ve reached a cycle stage. Staff have got Covid or become a close contact, they’ve had to be off for five days and they’re returning as others go off. It’s been really tough, but we’re getting through it,” says Brook.
“Anything where there are high labour costs – and that’s our industry – it’s being affected a huge amount. That’s especially true for the small tour operators, surf classes, jetski places. If they lose two or three staff, that’s their business shut down.”
Some of the larger hotels on the Gold Coast have had trouble getting fresh linen, as workers at third-party contractors who wash and replace bedding have been affected by the Covid wave.
At the Big4 Gold Coast Holiday Park, the general manager, Andrew Hewitt, has been doing shifts in the kitchen. Last week he made the “previously unspeakable” decision to close the cafe for dinner service.
“We’re in the second year of this now. We’ve done a lot of things that were unprecedented in the last 24 months,” Hewitt says.
He says tourism operators had been aware of the challenge Covid outbreaks could pose once the state borders opened.
“If anyone thought this season was going to be a walk in the park, of course it wasn’t. I told my family: ‘Do not expect to see me home over Christmas’.
“Housekeeping was my biggest concern and still is. If you’ve got no one to make the beds, how can you sell a room?
“We had people answering reservation calls from home [but] one day we just had to say the phones aren’t going to go online until 9am. We didn’t even have somebody to take messages.
“Just when you think you’re going good, all of a sudden a staff member goes down. Then two go down.”
‘We had high hopes’
North Queensland’s tourist market has been hit harder than most during the pandemic. The local industry’s umbrella group estimates businesses have lost $5.3bn in potential revenue while international and many domestic tourists were locked out due to border closures.
Prior to 2020, the Cairns area had about 2,500 tours and other “products” to entertain travellers. Of those, more than 600 are no longer operating.
Christmas period bookings in Cairns had been strong – an increase compared with the last real summer, in December 2019. But the reality has been 50% worse than the initial forecast and “millions of dollars of cancellations”, says the Tourism Tropical North Queensland chief executive, Mark Olsen.
“We had high hopes,” he says. “We saw a flurry of businesses reopening when the borders reopened. For many of them this will be the hardest time. They’ve reopened at what was going to be the boom time. They’ve scaled up and they’re ready and the customers just aren’t there. They’re the ones we worry about the most.
“This was supposed to be the turning point, a domestic boom that would push us through … and it’s just been a fizzer.”
Olsen says staff, linen and produce shortages had become a particular concern. Many hotels were locking rooms – not offering them to tourists – because of the shortages.
“What we’re seeing is a lot of our frontline staff have left the industry or left the region. A lot of staff who were coming to help during the peak season couldn’t leave home, caught up in the Covid circus,” he says.
“It’s exacerbated the problem and we’re now starting to see those supply chain issues coming through. Businesses are now losing really experienced people because the cashflow is so tight.”
The chief executive of Destination Gold Coast, Patricia O’Callaghan, says the area had been banking on a $280m summer.
“Things are still solid, but the challenge is that there’s a lot of businesses operating at reduced capacity or closed,” O’Callaghan says.
“I would say, as a whole, tourism and hospitality is facing some of the most difficult operating conditions since the pandemic took hold.
“We’ve lost so many businesses and we will continue to until these conditions improve. But we do feel like we’re moving forward. We’re seeing policy changes that are trying to ease restrictions. We’re in a phase where case numbers are increasing and trying to ride it as best as possible.”
Looking to Easter
Having invested so much in the restart of domestic tourism, businesses are now looking to Easter as the next realistic chance to boost their markets – and the confidence of travellers.
In Cairns, forward bookings for Easter have been encouraging.
But uncertainty remains in the minds of many would-be holidaymakers. Some are already planning to ride the waves of Surfers’ famous break. Others remain unwilling to lock in their next trip, for fear it will coincide with another Covid wave.
“From January to the end of March, bookings have gone backwards, not forward,” says Brook.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty. We were really hoping we wouldn’t be going through this two years later.”