Change the Holidays
27 September 2020 -I’m told my genius idea is not original but its original to me so I’m claiming it. It is thus: stagger the New Zealand school holidays so that the whole country is not on holiday at the same time. I conceived of this due to the extreme busyness of the July school holidays but there is no reason this could not be an ongoing strategy to spread the holiday load and achieve the double-pronged benefit of making the holiday more pleasant for the holiday makers and give businesses a boom month rather than a frantic fortnight.
I’ll leave the particulars to the Ministry of Education to work out. The ski capitals of Queenstown and Wanaka being areas of my primary concern, I recommend that the split is done on an island by island basis. ‘But Auckland’! I hear some exclaim. Yes, it could be Auckland v The Rest, but a huge chunk of our visitors come from our home provinces; Southland, Otago and a very healthy slice from Canterbury and surrounds. So I’m recommending a straight North v South split.
