Whakarewarewa, The Living Māori Village, is a cultural and geothermal attraction on Tryon Street in Rotorua, owned and run by the Tūhourangi Ngāti Wāhiao families who still live there. The business sits inside the Whakarewarewa Village Charitable Trust and its wholly owned subsidiary, Whakarewarewa Thermal Village Tours Limited. It is worth a profile because the trust files audited group accounts with the Charities Register, and those accounts show a community-owned operator coming back from almost nothing faster than most of the industry.
It started with guiding, long before it was a business
The village’s own account is that its people have been hosting visitors since the early 1800s. Tūhourangi guides were among the best known in the country at the Pink and White Terraces near Te Wairoa, and after the 1886 Tarawera eruption destroyed the terraces, guiding shifted to Whakarewarewa. The guides on the tour today are, in the operator’s words, direct descendants of those early guides. That lineage is the product. Nobody else can sell it.
The trust has five trustees, one independent and the others nominated from village trusts, and its stated purposes are to promote Māori art and culture, racial harmony and Māori education. It is an incorporated charitable trust, not a council body. Its accounts are audited by Silks Audit, and the opinion for the year to 30 June 2025 is unmodified.
How it is built now: one gate, several ways through it
The product is simple and priced in plain sight. A one-hour guided village walk runs seven times a day, with 20 to 30 guests a tour. There is a daily cultural performance at 12.30pm, self-guided geothermal trails, a hāngī and steam-cooked food, e-bike hire, and an all-day pass that bundles them. The adult price for the guided tour was $55 for the year to 30 September 2026 and goes to $58 from 1 October, a rise of 5.5 percent, published a year ahead on the operator’s own page.
The group also lets property in the village: four residential, four retail and two commercial properties, plus a kōhanga reo, all on subsidised leases according to its service performance statement. Rent is small beside the gate, at $93,315 last year.
The recovery, from the audited statements:
| Year to 30 June | Total revenue | Of which sales and admissions | Surplus (deficit) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | $4,697,835 | not split out | $669,341 |
| 2021 | $889,229 | $306,973 | ($772,778) |
| 2022 | $805,141 | $390,888 | ($884,219) |
| 2023 | $3,478,955 | $3,282,094 | $843,987 |
| 2024 | $5,625,884 | $5,415,148 | $1,414,913 |
| 2025 | $6,300,488 | $6,176,072 | $1,093,426 |
Revenue in 2024/25 was 34.1 percent above the last full pre-pandemic year. In the two Covid years the group lost $1,656,997 between them, and in 2021 more of the group’s income came from grants, funding and the wage subsidy, $522,167, than from trading.
The number
15.8x
Sales and admissions at Whakarewarewa in the year to June 2025, $6,176,072, against $390,888 three years earlier, when the borders were still shut. (Whakarewarewa Village Charitable Trust audited performance reports 2022 and 2025, calculation ours)
What is worth copying
It borrowed to survive, then paid it back first. In 2020/21 the trust took a $1 million loan from MBIE’s Strategic Tourism Assets Protection Programme at 3 percent, alongside bank debt. Total borrowings peaked at $2,429,915 in June 2022. By June 2025 they were $377,214, down 84.5 percent, a single government-guaranteed bank loan for a new bridge into the village. The STAPP balance went from $850,000 in 2023 to nil in 2025, well before its March 2026 due date. In the last year alone the group repaid $1,152,566 of loans and spent $1,404,405 on property and equipment, funded from $1,334,503 of operating cash flow and by drawing down its term deposits.
It paid its landowners what it owed them. The land is leased from the Rahui Trust at $90,000 a year, and payments were deferred during Covid. The 2025 accounts show $310,859 paid out in the year, the normal $90,000 plus $220,859 of arrears, and the deferred lease is now cleared. For an operator on someone else’s land, keeping that relationship whole matters more than any single year’s surplus.
It prices ahead and says so. Publishing next year’s rates on the booking page, a year out, is what the trade needs to build contracts, and it takes the argument out of every annual increase. Many operators still reprice by surprise.
The purpose is written into the accounts, not the brochure. The service performance statement counts what the money did: koha for tangihanga, support for the marae, maintenance on kaumātua homes, insurance for the whare tupuna. Koha paid out rose from $35,642 to $144,387. A reader can check whether the charitable claim is real, and here it is.
Where the model runs out of road
The ground can close the business. Whakarewarewa sits on an active geothermal field. In July 2022 a visiting couple from Perth were injured when a fumarole opened on the path near the entrance, and the village closed for about three weeks. In late August 2025 a sinkhole shut Wāhiao Drive, the main road in, cutting off all vehicle and pedestrian access and stopping tours for almost a week, until an alternative walkway opened across neighbouring land with council help. The trust’s accounts record the second event after balance date and say its financial effect is unknown. No insurance line can make that risk go away, and it is the same thing that makes the place worth visiting.
Costs grew faster than sales last year. Sales and admissions rose 14.1 percent in 2024/25, but cost of goods sold rose 63.9 percent, from 14.0 to 20.1 percent of sales, wages rose 21.3 percent and other expenses 44.6 percent. The surplus fell 22.7 percent and the margin dropped from 25.2 to 17.4 percent. Some of that is deliberate, with more koha and more staff, but it is a trend to watch in a business whose volume depends on Rotorua’s overall visitor numbers.
The cleanup used up the cushion. Cash and term deposits fell from $2,053,406 to $857,776 in a year, down 58.2 percent. Meanwhile the board has approved a further $600,000 of spending on the village entrance “Precinct” project in 2025/26, and the accounts say its total cost and completion date are unknown. Low debt and low cash together is a respectable position, but it leaves less room for another week with the road closed.
The public summary does not match the accounts. The Charities Register’s summary for the trust shows a 2024/25 surplus of $2,333,724 and equity of $4,999,664. The audited statements say $1,093,426 and $4,765,967, and the 2023/24 summary surplus matches that year’s operating cash flow rather than its surplus. Anyone relying on the register’s headline figures, including funders, gets the wrong numbers. The PDF is the record.
It cannot grow the product very far. This is a living village with homes, a marae and urupā inside it. Tour sizes are capped and the site cannot be extended without changing what it is. Growth has to come from price, from spend per visitor, and from the trails and add-ons at the edges, which is roughly what the trust is doing.
What to take from it
If you run a small operator with a strong story and borrowed your way through the pandemic, the transferable lesson is the order of priorities. Whakarewarewa paid the government and bank lenders first, made its landowner whole second, and put the rest into its own infrastructure, all within three years of reopening. It did that with a product that has a fixed ceiling on volume, by raising prices steadily and in public.
The caution is about the buffer. A business on unstable ground, literally in this case, needs cash in hand more than most, and this one spent most of its reserve on getting debt-free. Getting debt-free was the right call. The next job is rebuilding the reserve before the next closure.
Written from public sources: the Whakarewarewa Village Charitable Trust’s audited performance reports for the years ended 30 June 2019, 2022, 2024 and 2025, filed on the Charities Register (CC24216) and read in full; the register’s annual return summaries; the operator’s own website and published prices; NZ Herald and Rotorua Daily Post reports of 28 July 2022, 3 September 2022 and 29 August 2025; and published histories of Whakarewarewa. Written without the operator’s involvement. The Shoulder Season has no commercial relationship with any business it covers, takes no payment for coverage, and gives no subject approval over what is published.
Operator profiles run every week or two, a different business each time. Written from public sources, with no involvement from the operator and no commercial relationship of any kind.