As previously reported, Qualmark Chair David Wilks welcomed new General Manager, Paula McCallum and announced that he is to step down to take a position as a Director of DOC's Commercial Business Unit. Tim Hunter, Tourism New Zealand's General Manager New Zealand Operations will take over as Chair.
Further changes from an ongoung fundamental revamp of Qualmark's operations have also been announced. Qualmark have confirmed that they will be evacuating their Auckland inner city offices off Queen Street and camping with Tourism New Zealand further up the road.
Qualmark licence holders that are interested in how Qualmark will carry out future assessments were given some clues:
"...in future we plan to tailor the process more closely to business type and make it more appropriate to a business's assessment history."If anyone knows what this means, please enlighten us?
We see that after accommodation sector reviews, the Hotels and Holiday Parks criteria have been finalised. This begs the question: when can we expect the "Motel" sector criteria to be finally completed after "years" of inane, unfocused debate? Maybe new General Manager, Paula McCallum can take charge of this elongated consultation merry-go-round soon after commencing her new position. This would be a worthy project for her to cut her teeth on and get an early insight into the complex dynamics of herding cats.
For us the highlight of the newsletter was the first official communication that we have seen from Qualmark that confirms that the contentious, politically correct environmental criteria will be finally extracted from their quality assessment (Qualmark prefers to use the term "de-coupling"). This means that accommodation businesses will no longer have their quality star gradings dependent upon demonstrating their allegiance to fashionable environmental and social mantra.
We have to give credit where credit is due. Qualmark after making a lot of noise and effort peddling a Dark Green Agenda have at last admitted that they were wrong. We hope they get back on track by focusing on offering a compelling quality benchmarking system for the tourism industry.
