Right now I’m seeing market failure that requires government intervention.

Time and time again we have seen private investors promise hotels which should have been built by now and have not been delivered.

The stadium, the swimming pool, the town hall, the library, the convention centre and many other public assets have now been either almost completed or delivered.

Short stay accommodation and the residential district in the CBD is being delivered and shows strong growth.

However short stay accommodation is no use to tour operators around the world.

If you were wanting to organize a convention on behalf of a special interest group such as a society of woolweavers then arranging accommodation in Christchurch is currently almost impossible.

Tour operators will struggle to organize 150 beds in one location on any given night.

Some people have suggested to me that the two are operator should organise 75 Airbnb reservations however this is a completely untenable and unrealistic suggestion.

Short stay accommodation is absolutely fantastic for self-motivated small groups of individuals that need to organize a single unit in the city of which there are thousands and thousands of potential tourists around the world however not enough.

In my view in order to get Airlines flying more flights into the city consistently they need to be able to see that their regular community of two operators are able to book out two or three buses and a hotel to host groups of up to 150 or 200 people in a single setting.

Prior to the earthquakes this used to be an easy ask, today it is not.

Over the past decade we have seen many pledges from different organizations to establish hotels in the city and as yet we have yet to see many of these hotels actually appear.Industry leaders are telling me that hotel operators are struggling to find a business case when they cannot see the provision of Airlines being able to fly passengers into the city.From the perspective of Airlines, any area that I have some familiarity with, I can’t see justification to ask them to fly more flights when the tour operator community are simply unable to organize tours that would fill three quarters of a plane in one sitting.

This becomes a chicken and egg problem and that is where we consider market failure and we consider the question of government intervention.

We are now at the point where the governments needs to consider stepping in and funding the development of another 4,000 Hotel beds in the city to service the needs of global tour operators.

Once the Hotels are built they could then be sold into the private market once leases have been arranged for running those hotels and the necessary number of tourists has increased to a point to make a viable business case to get a return on the investment made by the government on behalf of the community.

There is any amount of precedent to do this as we already do it with the supply of fiber optics into our homes with the supply of roads up and down our country and other private public partnership arrangements that exist around the country.

The government already used Fletchers to build a huge amount of residential property in the city however they have left it to the commercial sector to organize the hotels that have been pleached have been promised but have not been delivered.

Over the past year I have spent some time in Auckland Airport and Wellington airport and both are busy and at capacity whereas spending time in Christchurch airport I discover that as is anything but busy and in fact reading the airports own reports via the city council it would appear that they are not meeting the targets that they have set for themselves.

Some people will argue that building hotels will then impact our Airbnb market and I argue that that is completely untrue and a fallacy.

As I previously wrote, the tour operators will fill out half to three quarters of an aircraft in one go leaving a third to a half of an aircraft still to be filled with self-motivated tourists who will come and stay independently in the short stay accommodation.

I also wonder if we’ve been focusing on grandiose grand plans for five star six star and seven star hotels and not actually being focusing on the mass tourist market which is actually essential because that represents most of the community around the world who want to come to New Zealand for a special holiday.

I regard Christchurch CBD as a factory for producing a widget and that widget is in fact a great holiday experience which is absolutely critical for environmental outcomes around the world.