As Cabinet weighs up New Zealand's quarantine-free travel arrangement with Australia, any changes to the bubble could put more pressure on the overloaded MIQ booking system. Experts are putting up their hands up to help the government improve the booking system, described as a "nightmare" by New Zealanders abroad.
There is significant demand for the 4000 MIQ rooms which are currently booked out until the end of November. Available rooms appear at random on the MIQ website and are booked on a first-come, first-served basis. But tech-savvy New Zealanders are using computer programming codes to snap up available spots within seconds, or paying freelancers to do it for them. So could the MIQ booking system be redesigned? And what would a fairer system look like? Kathryn asks the chief executive of NZ Tech Graeme Muller, and Tava Olsen, a queueing theorist at the University of Auckland's Business School.
Photo: RNZ / Marika Khabazi
