It’s Tuesday, and most of the people who decide where New Zealand’s next hotels get built are in one building in Ōtautahi. Here’s what’s moving.
The country’s hotel investment conference opens at Te Pae, at its largest yet
AHICE Aotearoa runs today and tomorrow at Te Pae Christchurch, the fifth time the Aotearoa Hotel Industry Conference and Exhibition has run and the biggest, with more than 500 delegates, over 130 speakers and more than 80 sponsors. It is hosted by HM Magazine and Hotel Council Aotearoa, with Accor, Agilysys, EVT and Scenic Hotel Group as principal partners and Tourism New Zealand supporting. The programme covers the investor and developer outlook, regional growth, white-label management, design and a new technology stream.
The mood going in is set by a run of transactions rather than a forecast. Colliers national director of hotels Nick Thompson told Hotel Management last week that New Zealand has picked up “safe investment haven” status with offshore capital, and the deal list behind that is real: the InterContinental Auckland sale set a national record, Hotel Indigo Auckland and QT Auckland changed hands, Rydges Wellington and Sofitel Queenstown went to Brookfield in a conditional deal, SkyCity has agreed to sell The Grand, and the Sebel Auckland Manukau is on the market now. Behind it sits the Sheraton conversion of the old Noah’s site opening in Christchurch next year.
The useful thing about a room like this is that it is where the assumptions get tested out loud. Hotel Council Aotearoa’s James Doolan calls it the conference where investment, operations and policy meet, and the policy half is not settled: the accommodation levy question is parked until after November, and the operators paying for the beds have views about that. Two days of panels will not resolve it. They will tell you what the people writing the cheques currently believe, which is worth knowing before you price next winter.
Source: AHICE Aotearoa · Hotel Management · Hotel Management, Colliers interview · Hospitality Business
Stat of the day
3.63 million
International visitor arrivals in the year to March 2026, up 9.2 percent, the number underwriting the current wave of hotel investment. (Colliers)
Accor signs two Mantra hotels for Hamilton, and the regions are the interesting part
Accor confirmed this morning it has signed two new-build Mantra hotels in Hamilton, a 52-room property on Pembroke Street and a 40-room property on Karewa Place, both due to open in 2027. They land alongside the 191-room Pullman already coming to the city, which arrives with restaurants, a day spa and a rooftop lounge.
Ninety-two rooms across two buildings is not a headline number, and that is exactly why it is worth reading. The last five years of New Zealand hotel development have been an Auckland, Queenstown and Christchurch story, with capital chasing the assets that trade. Hamilton is a city that has spent a decade being described as underserved for accommodation and has now been given a Pullman and two Mantras inside the same cycle.
What makes Hamilton work is not leisure demand. It is Te Rapa, the university, Fieldays, the events calendar at Claudelands and a two-hour drive from most of the upper North Island, which produces midweek business the coastal resort towns would take in a heartbeat. If the model holds, the operators watching most closely should be in Palmerston North, Napier and Tauranga.
Source: NZ Herald · Tourism Ticker · Bayleys
Experience Co’s New Zealand operations carried a soft Australian year
Experience Co closed FY26 with $129.6 million of revenue from continuing operations, up 2 percent, and underlying EBITDA down 8 percent to $17.6 million. The fourth quarter was harder: revenue up 1 percent to $29.4 million, underlying EBITDA down 31 percent to $2.0 million, with weather, fuel, wages and discounting all named. Skydiving revenue fell to $63.8 million for the year from $65.0 million, and tandem passengers eased to 117,000 from 119,000.
The split inside those numbers is the story for anyone here. Skydive New Zealand and Reef Unlimited traded stronger, while Skydive Australia went backwards enough that the company consolidated its Victorian operations into the Great Ocean Road drop zone, put the Melbourne site into care and maintenance and closed Yarra Valley permanently. A New Zealand skydiving business held up in a year that shut down two Australian ones.
That sits under the deal announced in July, in which Experience Co’s Australian and New Zealand skydive and aviation operations merge with Auckland-based Inflite Group at an enterprise value of about $110 million. Experience Co takes $41 million cash, a $5 million vendor note and 32.5 percent of the new entity, and Inflite shareholders hold the rest. Completion still depends on due diligence, financiers, documentation and regulatory approvals, and the company says plainly there is no certainty it proceeds. If it does, the trans-Tasman adventure aviation platform ends up majority New Zealand-owned, which is not the direction this sector’s ownership usually travels.
Source: Experience Co Q4 FY26 trading update, ASX · Business News Australia · Australian Aviation
The written reasons for the split rafting decision are now public
The Commerce Commission’s written reasons for clearing the Rotorua rafting merger are now on the case register, two months after the decision itself. Rotorua Rafting Holdings was cleared on 19 June to acquire the rafting and sledging assets of Rotorua Rafting, Kaitiaki Adventures and Kaituna Cascades, on a two-to-one split, after a process that ran from November, produced a statement of issues in January and at one point had the Commission signalling it might block the deal.
The reasoning is what matters beyond Rotorua. The majority accepted that the three businesses are close competitors, and cleared it anyway on the basis that the relevant market is the differentiated market for adventure tourism activities in Rotorua, not rafting alone, so the lost competition is constrained in aggregate by everything else a visitor could book that afternoon. Deputy chair Anne Callinan put the mitigation on that range of constraints. All three commissioners called it finely balanced.
Read that as a signal about how consolidation gets assessed in this industry. If a regulator treats a rafting trip, a zipline and a luge as constraints on each other, then a roll-up inside one activity category is more clearable than the market shares suggest, and a two-to-one split is a thin margin to build a strategy on. Anyone contemplating buying a competitor in a town with a deep activity mix should read the reasons before the lawyers price the advice.
Source: Commerce Commission clearance · Case register · RNZ
A salmon farm is fast-tracked 13km off Rakiura, and nobody has costed the view
The Hananui Aquaculture Project was approved under the fast-track regime yesterday, the 31st project through the process and the first in aquaculture. Ngāi Tahu Seafood Resources gets four marine farms across 1,285 hectares roughly 13 kilometres from Oban, producing up to 14,400 tonnes of king salmon a year, more than $310 million in annual sales and 415 to 480 jobs in Southland. Chris Bishop and Shane Jones announced it. The application was lodged in November 2025 and took about five months of expert panel work, on the end of a seven-year run that included a 2019 RMA application, a 2020 Covid fast-track attempt and a decline in 2023.
For Southland this is a large employer in a region that needs one, and it is iwi-owned, which changes the ownership conversation about primary industry in the deep south. That is a real thing and worth saying first.
The part the visitor economy should be watching is what it does to the Rakiura proposition. The island is 85 percent national park, holds Dark Sky Sanctuary accreditation from 2019 as the world’s southernmost, and sells birdlife, isolation and dark to a small, high-value, weather-dependent visitor market served out of a town of about 400 people. The farms sit offshore rather than in the tourist frame, and salmon farming and wild places coexist in plenty of places. But accommodation, boats and guides in Oban are competing for the same berths, staff and housing as a project employing several hundred, and there is no line in any of yesterday’s documents that prices what happens to a positioning built on emptiness. That question does not get asked by a fast-track panel. It gets answered later, by whoever is still taking bookings.
Source: Beehive · NBR · Dark Sky Sanctuary, Rakiura
Business events puts a levy and a funding ask into the election
Business Events Industry Aotearoa released its election manifesto yesterday, titled Business Events Election Year 2026: Connection. Influence. Impact. The core argument is that business events should be treated as an economic and intellectual asset rather than a line item in tourism, with multi-day conferences putting around $925 million into the economy in 2025. BEIA is asking the next government for more event funding and backing a regional accommodation levy on a hypothecated model, where the money raised in a region stays in that region.
Chief executive Lisa Hopkins framed it as building on value the sector already generates rather than asking for a rescue, which is a more durable pitch than most pre-election documents manage. It also puts BEIA alongside the regional tourism organisations, who made the same levy call in June, on an issue the Government has said it will not touch before November.
The levy debate has been running long enough that positions are now more interesting than principles. Business events want it because their competitors overseas are funded by exactly this mechanism and they lose bids on budget. Accommodation providers, who collect it, are the ones carrying the compliance and the guest conversation. Both of those groups are in Christchurch this week, which should make for a more honest panel than the manifesto.
Source: Conference & Meetings World · TTGmice · RNZ
Coming up
- Today and tomorrow AHICE Aotearoa, Te Pae Christchurch
- 13 August New Zealand Cruise Association conference, Shed 10, Auckland
- 21-22 August Beervana, Wellington
- 24 August Group, tour escort and ADS FIT visa applications move to enhanced Immigration Online
- 25 August Tourism Holdings audited FY26 results
- 27 August West Coast Tourism Summit, Greymouth
- 28 August Air New Zealand FY26 annual results, and July Monthly Regional Tourism Estimates on the revised basis
- 31 August The new runway end safety area rule takes effect
- 13 September Auckland’s City Rail Link opens to passengers
- 4 November Tourism Summit Aotearoa and the NZ Tourism Awards, Te Pae Christchurch
- 2027 Accor’s two Mantra hotels open in Hamilton
That's today's briefing. The Shoulder Season is back every weekday morning.