The new Virtual lobby system of MIQ voucher allocation that came into place on September 20 saw 5,364 people from 117 countries managing to secure MIQ vouchers.
According to statistics released by MIQ, 1352 passengers coming from Australia managed to get vouchers followed by 774 passengers from Great Britain. Interestingly, India ranked third in the list, with 460 applicants from India who managed to get a MIQ voucher. This accounts for nearly 8.5 % of total passengers getting the voucher are travelling from India and highest in the Indian subcontinent.
"There are so many Kiwi Indians who are stuck in India and want to come back home. This number is a reflection of the same, and of the fact that they want to come back to their home New Zealand as soon as possible," Kiwi Indian Aditya Dang said.
453 applicants from the United States of America, 268 from China, 167 from Singapore and 135 from Canada were successful in securing a MIQ voucher.
In terms of rooms, 338 rooms for September; 1767 for October; 600 for November and 500 for December were released on September 20 2021.
According to Joint Head of MIQ, Megan Main, “At its peak, there were 31,800 in the queue and 3,205 rooms were released. I know many thousands of people missed out on vouchers. I want to reassure people that there are still several thousand vouchers still to be released through to the end of the year. They will get other chances. There will be another large release of a few thousand vouchers early next week, and there may also be another smaller one later this week.”
She further added, “By Wednesday afternoon, we'll know how many vouchers haven't been confirmed and can be re-released. We'll give people advance notice of this – as we will for all future releases. The new lobby system is not a silver bullet — it will not fix the issue of supply and demand. There is not an unlimited number of MIQ rooms, and we do not release them all at once as we're in the middle of a global pandemic, and we need to keep New Zealand safe.”