It’s Thursday, and most of the news is in the south of the South Island. Five items.
Wānaka is getting a 136-room Sudima hotel, the town’s first significant new hotel since 1986
A $180 million development at the foot of Mount Iron will put a 136-room Sudima hotel alongside 72 townhouses and apartments, shared pools, dining and conference space on 1.8 hectares. Sudima’s operator, Hind Management, will run both the hotel and the residences, which start at $1.4 million and can go into a managed rental arrangement. Earthworks are expected early next year and the build is expected to take four years, though timing depends on an amended resource consent being granted. The project was first proposed in 2022 by KR Capital, part of Kirk Roberts, and shelved during the downturn.
The gap it fills is real. Wānaka has not had a new hotel of any size since the 106-room Edgewater opened in 1986, and in the meantime its visitor beds have largely come from houses. Mayor Quentin Smith made exactly that point to RNZ: large-scale accommodation is one way to get homes back for locals. Sudima founder Sudesh Jhunjhnuwala described the market as lacking a “high-quality, full-service hotel”, and the plans include conference space. A full-service hotel with meeting rooms changes what the town can bid for in the shoulder months.
The caveats are the usual ones. The consent amendment is not yet granted, four years is a long build, and the residential sales have to land for the hotel to follow. Wānaka’s wastewater and health services are already stretched, and a separate $300 million private health precinct sits 700 metres away.
Source: RNZ, Otago Daily Times
Stat of the day
1986
The year Wānaka last opened a significant new hotel, the 106-room Edgewater. The planned Sudima would be 30 rooms larger. (RNZ)
Mat Woods leaves Destination Queenstown and Lake Wānaka Tourism on 1 December for a Californian ski resort
The chief executive of both regional tourism organisations is leaving after more than four years to become executive director of resort services at Sugar Bowl Resort in California, run by former Cardrona and Treble Cone general manager Bridget Legnavsky. Sarah O’Donnell, the two RTOs’ destination and brand general manager, takes over.
Woods led both bodies out of the border closures, through the region’s destination management plan, and into the shared services partnership that now runs Queenstown and Wānaka marketing under one executive. An internal appointment suggests the boards want that arrangement left as it is. It also means the region’s most prominent tourism voice changes hands during the bed levy argument, which the election has left unresolved.
Source: Otago Daily Times
Franz Josef’s river is rising 20cm a year, and the experts advising on it say the 2023 plan has barely started
Two members of the independent Waiho Technical Advisory Group, Ian Fuller of Massey and Tim Davies of Canterbury, have set out the problem in The Conversation. Since the 1980s, stopbanks have held the Waiho River to about a third of its natural bed, so the gravel it carries out of the Alps piles up instead of spreading. The bed is rising about 20 centimetres a year, three times its natural rate, and every rise shrinks the margin the stopbanks offer the township that more than a million visitors a year pass through on the way to the glaciers.
In 2023 the group recommended a ten-year plan to give the river room across its western floodplain. That would mean moving part of State Highway 6, the main visitor road along the Coast, and clearing farms, landfills and other infrastructure off the western flats. When the group met again in August, it found land purchases and relocation had not started and highway planning was at an early stage, while the river was moving faster than modelled: between March 2025 and March 2026 the spill into the Tatare Stream moved a kilometre upstream and the new channel cut down two metres.
Their diagnosis is governance. Flood protection, planning, roading and emergency management each sit with a different body, and nobody owns the whole plan. They propose a group led by Westland District Council with the regional council and central agencies, mandated to find government money. For anyone selling the West Coast, the takeaway is that SH6 at Franz Josef is a long-term risk with no funded fix.
Source: The Conversation
Starlux files a Taipei to Auckland service via Sydney from 23 March 2027
Taiwan’s Starlux Airlines has filed schedules for a Taipei-Sydney-Auckland route starting 23 March 2027, according to the route tracker AeroRoutes. It will run four times a week at first and daily from 1 May, on Airbus A330-900neo aircraft, leaving Taipei in the evening and reaching Auckland mid-afternoon the following day. Bookings have not yet opened.
The routing through Sydney makes it a slower trip for New Zealand-bound travellers than a nonstop, but it plugs Auckland into Starlux’s connecting network at Taipei, which reaches across Asia and to North America. The airline has not published its own announcement, so treat the start date as filed rather than confirmed.
Source: AeroRoutes
Curio Bay’s campground still has no operator for summer after the chosen one pulled out
Southland District Council picked a new operator for the Curio Bay campground and the Curioscape cafe this month, after an expressions of interest round that drew interest from around the country, and then the operator withdrew. The campground recorded about 17,300 stays in 2025 and sits beside the Catlins’ petrified forest, Hector’s dolphins and hoiho. It has been at risk since the South Catlins Charitable Trust left its expiring lease.
On Wednesday councillors agreed a two-stage approach: an interim operator for the 2026/27 season, appointed by the chief executive, and a long-term model worked up from early 2027. The trust gets a lease on the Tumu Toka Curioscape building. Summer is close, and Catlins accommodation is thin enough that every unbooked site sends travellers somewhere else.
Source: Otago Daily Times
Coming up
- 22 November: World Triathlon Cup Tauranga, Mount Maunganui, the first of three years leading to the 2028 World Triathlon Championships (Scoop)
- 24 and 27 November: notified 24-hour strikes by Auckland Airport’s emergency services team
- 27 November: official election result due
- 1 December: Sarah O’Donnell takes over as chief executive of Destination Queenstown and Lake Wānaka Tourism
- 23 March 2027: Starlux’s filed start date for Taipei-Sydney-Auckland
That's today's briefing. The Shoulder Season is back every weekday morning.