It’s Monday, and the weekend delivered a record result, a record crowd and a mountain that moved three times. Here’s what’s moving.
Skyline’s profit more than doubles as Queenstown runs hot
Skyline Enterprises has reported net profit after tax of $86.1 million for the year to March, more than double the previous year, on a 15% lift in revenue. Shareholders get a record dividend of 85 cents a share. The company, which runs the Queenstown gondola and luge along with luge operations offshore, is one of the few sizeable pure-play attraction businesses in the country that publishes numbers at all.
Read the revenue line rather than the profit line. A 15% revenue improvement is the honest trading signal, and it lines up with what everyone in the resort has been saying since autumn, that international visitation is now past 2019 levels with Queenstown leading the national recovery. The profit number sits alongside a corporate reshuffle: Skyline agreed to sell Christchurch Casinos, after a $5 million anti-money laundering penalty, with settlement due around the middle of this year, and NBR reports the company is still waiting on around $102 million of proceeds from that deal. Until the accounts are public it is worth separating the gondola business from the balance sheet event.
Source: Otago Daily Times · NBR · NZ Herald
Stat of the day
$86.1m
Skyline Enterprises' net profit after tax for the 12 months to March, more than double the prior year, with a record 85 cents a share going back to shareholders. (Otago Daily Times, 24 July 2026)
January’s fatal Mauao landslide reactivated three times over the weekend
Tauranga City Council says the landslide that killed six people at the Mount Maunganui Beachside Holiday Park in January has reactivated, with three separate movements on Friday night, Saturday morning and early Sunday. Recovery manager Charlie Rahiri called it a major regression, with the head of the slip retreating about 20 metres and roughly 8,000 cubic metres of earth shifting, against about 12,000 cubic metres in January. Monitoring equipment alerted geotechnical staff before each movement and nobody was in the area. Adams Avenue is closed to vehicles between Pilot Bay and the Maunganui Road roundabout, with residents and businesses still reachable via the southern footpath.
The timing is brutal for the operators at the base. This week marks six months since the slide, Mauao itself has been shut throughout, and the walking circuit that normally feeds that strip of cafés and shops is gone with it. Beach Hut Café owner Michelle Craig told 1News the businesses there “stumble along in the dark”, with no timeline and no plan they can trade against. A quantitative landslide risk assessment and a WorkSafe investigation are both still running, and the council has said an update on the road closure is due this week. Bay of Plenty MP Tom Rutherford’s point is the one to pass on to anyone routing guests through: the mountain is closed, the town is not.
Source: 1News · SunLive · 1News, business impact · Tauranga City Council
A record football crowd is worth 27,000 visitor nights to Auckland
Eden Park drew 40,112 people on Sunday for Tottenham Hotspur against Auckland FC, the biggest crowd for a men’s football match in New Zealand, past the 37,034 who watched the All Whites play Peru in 2017. Tottenham won 2-0, which was never the point. Tātaki Auckland Unlimited chief executive Nick Hill put the event at about $3 million for the regional economy and roughly 27,000 nights of visitor accommodation.
That ratio is the interesting part: 40,000 seats converting to 27,000 bed nights means a large share of the crowd travelled, in the last week of July, into a city whose hotels would otherwise be discounting. This is what the Government’s $70 million Major Events and Tourism Package is meant to buy, and it is the same logic behind Te Pae’s convention numbers last week. Auckland gets another go at it on 8 August, when Chelsea’s women play an Auckland FC Women’s Invitational XI at the same ground.
Source: 1News · Eden Park · RNZ
DOC backs off removing the Hahei Short Walk after a local pushback
The Department of Conservation has stepped away, for now, from its proposal to remove the Hahei Short Walk near Mautohe Cathedral Cove. Consultation closed on 19 June with 33 submissions, alongside a “Don’t Close Our Cathedral Cove Tracks” petition that gathered 1,311 signatures. Rather than confirm the removal, DOC will sit down with the Hahei Residents and Ratepayers Association and the Harsant family to look at a reroute. Regional director Tinaka Mearns said the department is “looking to try something new for this site”. No date for those talks has been set and no extra money has been allocated.
Two things sit underneath this. The first is that DOC has been explicit that its funding goes to keeping the main track to Mautohe Cathedral Cove open, and that the Waimata-Gemstone Bay track will not be repaired a third time. The second is that the Coromandel has now spent three years learning what a single unstable hillside does to a destination brand built on one photograph. Submitters argued the side tracks are part of the experience rather than optional extras, and on the evidence of the last three summers they are right about what visitors actually do there.
Source: Department of Conservation · LiveNews
Gisborne gets its grandstand back after seven years
Rugby Park in Tūranganui-a-Kiwa Gisborne reopened on Saturday with the new John Heikell Grandstand, 900 covered seats, upgraded player and media facilities, a new scoreboard and reworked grounds. The $12.5 million project drew $11.3 million from Kānoa, the regional development arm of MBIE, with Trust Tairāwhiti and the Lottery Grants Board covering the rest. The old stand opened in 1955 and closed in 2019 on seismic grounds, leaving the region without a venue that could hold a fixture worth travelling for.
For a region that has spent the past three years dealing with cyclone recovery rather than growth, a compliant stadium is a straightforward piece of visitor economy infrastructure. Talk locally has already turned to hosting the Māori All Blacks or a Hurricanes fixture, and one of those brings a few thousand overnight visitors into a district that has almost no other reason to fill beds in winter. Associate Regional Development Minister Mark Patterson, who was there, noted 26 local businesses worked on the build.
Source: Beehive · Trust Tairāwhiti · NZ Herald
Coming up
- 28 July – New Hooker Valley suspension bridge opens to the public at Aoraki, 3pm
- 30 July – Early-bird registration closes for Tourism Summit Aotearoa
- 1 August – Visa Wellington On a Plate opens, running across the month
- 5-6 August – TECNZ conference, Te Pae Christchurch
- 7 August – Submissions close on the RCT Group zipline concession application
- 8 August – Chelsea FC Women v an Auckland FC Women’s Invitational XI, Eden Park
- 10 August – Ridgeburn’s deadline to supply further information to the fast-track panel
- 11-12 August – AHICE Aotearoa, Te Pae Christchurch
- 24 August – Group, tour escort and ADS FIT visa applications move to enhanced Immigration Online
- 25 August – Tourism Holdings audited FY26 results
- 26 October – Air New Zealand becomes the first international airline into Western Sydney Airport, three return services a week from Auckland
- 28 October – Air New Zealand’s first direct Christchurch–Singapore service departs
- 4 November – Tourism Summit Aotearoa and NZ Tourism Awards, Te Pae Christchurch
- 19 November – Air Niugini’s earliest planned resumption of Port Moresby–Auckland, after two deferrals
- 22 July 2028 – Total solar eclipse across the lower South Island, Milford to Dunedin
That's today's briefing. The Shoulder Season is back every weekday morning.