COMMENT: I’m sitting at my desk, idly browsing Twitter, when my computer begins to beep.
It takes me just five seconds to jolt upright, switch browser windows, and click the ‘Next’ button on the MIQ booking page. But that’s still not fast enough. The room is gone.
An hour and a half later, my laptop begins to blare once more. This time I’m certain I’m faster in switching windows, but then I’m confronted with an automated reCAPTCHA verifier, asking me to select which tiles of a blurry Google Streetview image include a traffic light. By the time I finish frantically clicking traffic lights, the room is gone.
For just over 20 hours, over the course of seven days, I ran a tool which automatically refreshes the MIQ booking page in another browser window. If a room is available, it begins to beep.
Of 10,091 refreshes, just 58 of them gave me a shot at a room. I never succeeded, even when I tied my five second record on five other occasions. My median time was seven seconds from refresh to hitting the button.
The page I downloaded the tool from said the time to beat is three seconds. I don’t know how true that is, but I struggle to imagine how someone would be able to react, swap browser windows, fill in the reCAPTCHA and click the ‘Next’ button in that little time.
It’s important to note that, as far as I can tell, the script I used is allowed under the MIQ terms and conditions. Those ban the use of bots or anything that would automate the entire booking process and they also prevent you from giving out your account details to third parties. But the tool I used simply refreshed the page.
These auto-refreshers are specifically cited as a valid method on the MIQ website. The same section of the website, however, raises the spectre of a ban even for using an approved tool.
"Some people use date checkers or page auto-refreshers on the front calendar, prior to the booking process, to identify an available date, but this is no different to repeatedly refreshing the calendar page by hand, or signing up to receive alerts from a Twitter notification service," the website states.
But then: "If the page auto-refreshes too frequently, the user is auto blocked by our security system, making it no more advantageous than clicking refresh."
I never found myself blocked, despite refreshing the page once every seven seconds and 10,000 times in total. However, others who have used similar tools - one anecdote I was told involved a tool that refreshed only every four minutes - have reported that they are now unable to access the MIQ allocation site. That's despite following all the rules.
When I asked the managed isolation team for clarity about what counts as "too frequently" and whether those following the terms and conditions were having their IP addresses blocked, a spokesperson unhelpfully responded: "For operational and security reasons MIQ does not reveal how it monitors use of the Managed Isolation Allocation System."
This underscores the arbitrariness of the MIQ booking system. If people using scripts that follow the rules can be blocked from accessing the platform, then the safest thing to do is to just refresh manually. But when even the people using scripts can't get a room, what hope does anyone clicking the refresh button themselves really have?
At the most basic level, the issue here is one of supply and demand. Demand for MIQ rooms so vastly outstrips supply that each available room is gone in a matter of seconds.
People are snapping them up so fast that they don't bother to check if the date works until after the booking is secure. On a few occasions, I had to sprint into action multiple times in the span of a couple of minutes, all over the same date in late August. My best guess is that people were booking the rooms, realising that there were no compatible flights for that date, and then cancelling the booking, leading to yet another scramble for the rest of us.
In fact, all of the rooms we were scrapping over were cancelled dates. As far as I can tell, MIQ didn't release any new rooms into the system over the course of my experiment. Perhaps if they had, I would have had an easier time booking a room. Even so, when the first batch of rooms for November were released in early July, they were snapped up within minutes. On any given day, more than 10,000 people are logging onto the website to try to get a room, when there are just 4000 available spots per fortnight.
While the supply and demand issue may be unresolvable, the arbitrariness of the system can be addressed. The most obvious solution is something like that floated by the National Party: A waitlist where those on it are prioritised under a points system, like the current immigration system. People with essential skills, or who were travelling to visit dying relatives, would be prioritised above those who merely want to go on holiday.
Some would say this forces the Government into dangerous territory of choosing who deserves to come in and who doesn't. Certainly it's true that this opens the Government up to a new avenue of criticism.
But the decision to stick with the status quo is an implicit endorsement of the existing, arbitrary system.
That's one in which someone seeking to visit a parent on their deathbed has the same chance of getting a room as someone wanting to vacation in Bali. It's one that advantages those who are tech-savvy enough to use a script which improves their chances of getting a room but doesn't break the rules. And it's one in which even those who follow the rules can find themselves mysteriously banned from the platform - and by extension, the country - without means of appeal.
Just because something is the status quo doesn't mean it's worth keeping, particularly when the status quo is as grossly inequitable and arbitrary as the current MIQ booking system.
