South Westland bridge collapse sparks chopper taxi service and halving of room prices

Monday, 1 April 2019

Members of an Active Adventures tour group disembark from their chopper shuttle across the Waiho River.

A tour company is using a helicopter taxi service to get its clients over the flood-damaged Waiho Bridge on the West Coast.

And businesses in Fox and Franz Josef isolated by last week's bridge collapse are slashing prices - in some cases by more than half - to attract custom as replacement of the bridge is pushed out to April 12.

Active Adventures chief executive Michelle Trapski said resorting to chopper transport during major road closures was becoming standard practice to avoid disappointing their small tour groups of about a dozen travellers

'Our job is to delight our clients, not to give them the news that they are going to double back and do a massive big loop and go all the way back up to Christchurch.'

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A bus sent from Christchurch met the tour group on the other side of the river, Trapski said.

Okarito Kayaks owner Barry Hughes says they will have to tighten their belts to cope with the prolonged closure of the West Coast highway.

Several local helicopter operators are ferrying people across the river and HeliservicesNZ worker Ethan O'Donnell said they charged about $40 a head for a full load of four passengers.

But the prolonged road closure between Franz Josef and Fox Glacier, and news that vast amounts of plastic rubbish flushed from a dump site by heavy rain has contaminated long stretches of West Coast beaches, has been a real blow to South Westland tourism businesses.

Ashley Cassin of the Glacier Country tourism promotion group said accommodation providers had dramatically reduced prices or were offering two nights for one deals in a bid to attract visitors from Canterbury to make up for the lack of overseas visitors.

The Scenic Hotel in Franz Josef has rooms for $99 a night when it normally charges more than twice that, and some restaurants were discounting meals by 25 per cent.

Fox Glacier Guiding is still getting day trippers from Queenstown and Wanaka but chief executive Rob Jewel estimates their numbers are down by more than half as a result of the Waiho bridge collapse.

Cassin said they were also working on discount packages for glacier trips and the community was uniting in a major effort to remove the rubbish which is strewed along at least 20 kilometres of coastline from Gillespies Beach to north of Okarito.

'It's pretty horrific, but there's a lot of work being done to fix it quickly.'

Okarito Kayaks owner Barry Hughes said the scale of the problem might only become evident in the next few days.

Meantime, the dramatic fall in visitors would have a significant impact financially.

'Most of those tours it has become impractical for them to come down the West Coast and we are receiving cancellations through to the middle of April.

'We will receive very little income for I suspect about three weeks … we're reliant on that income to fund the business year-round, it's a very seasonal area here and losing key infrastructure at this time of year is a big blow, but we will get through it.

'We have to learn to live with the environment we're in and pull our belts in.'

Chief executive of Fox Glacier Guiding Rob Jewell said that although day trippers from Queenstown and Wanaka continued to come, total numbers were still down by at least half.

It was always going to be a challenge getting the expertise and equipment on site to erect a new Bailey bridge in the time frame initially proposed by the Transport Agency, and West Coasters had geared themselves up for it taking longer.