NEW Zealand Tourism Industry Association Chief Executive Tim Cossar has announced that biometric costs should not be put on travellers into New Zealand.
The announcement comes as legislation in the New Zealand government dealing with the collection of biometric data such as fingerprints, iris and facial scans at New Zealand’s airports nears passing.
Cossar said his main worry is that that forcing visitors to pay for their own security checks could be damaging two-fold to tourism.
He said that firstly there would be a negative reaction from visitors having to actually pay, and secondly the actual process of taking care of these issues would be counter-intuitive to the idea that implementing biometrics at airports would speed-up check-in not create new lines of people.
If the legislation passes, Immigration New Zealand expects that the systems could be in place as early as 2011.
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