SO MANY wonderful memories & photos!!

New Zealand | Dec 16 - Dec 29, 2024

(Note: This review is for the Ruru PurePod instead of the one listed, due to schedule change. ) Just an amazing experience all around! We enjoyed the drive & walk across the farm to reach the Pod, the tranquility, amenities, stargazing, and local food. The bed was so comfy & the shower / bathroom was so much nicer than we expected for an off-grid experience - true luxury quality. We requested dinner & breakfast with our stay and the hosts really delivered a thoughtful and delicious menu that was a pleasure to eat while enjoying the view. Only one warning: the hike from the "carpark" is a little steep, so definitely recommend packing in as little with you as possible!

Great, convenient location for walking to main tourist areas in Queenstown without actually being right in the nightlife / bustle. Good partially-obstrcted view from our room, too. Standard but good-quality chain hotel amenities & services. Front desk staff were universally welcoming, polite & helpful.

Great quality for a boat berth! Bathroom was small, but had separate sink & a shower corner, so actually larger than I expected, being accustomed to boats with wet-baths.

Really cool property that is clearly a much-loved passion-project for the owners. Definitely in our top 2 accommodations for this trip! Bed & bath were the epitome of luxury, the shared sitting rooms were so inviting, and the location is super-convenient to dining, shopping & main roads. Loved the simple, contactless check-in process, but we also used the help number during our visit and were attended to promptly.

Good hotel in the city center. Very convenient to many of the central tourist spots. Similar amenities to many of the mid-range chain hotels we're used to in the US, but room was a little more spacious, which was handy since we were re-packing / shuffling souvenirs at this point in the trip. We had a hard time with parking, as it required interacting with the front desk multiple times, and we were there over a holiday, so it wasn't staffed full-time & the gate to the garage they had specified was lowered & locked on the holiday itself. We ended up finding our own surface parking, down the street.

We would not elect to stay at this property again, nor would we recommend booking for others. It was not very clean - there was hair from previous guests and either black mold or corrosion on many of the fixtures in the bathroom, as well as just a lot of wear, tear, dust, & staining on the furniture, bathroom floor & fixtures. They had a little sticker asking us to "please excuse any staining from the sulfur in the water" but I didn't perceive that to be the only cause. The window had been left open, allowing the sulfur-rich air from the adjacent lake to permeate everything with humidity & unpleasant smell. The balcony was just plain uninviting, and the walls were very thin, making the noise from other guests in the hallways and courtyard very hard to ignore. We seriously considered calling the travel agent for an alternative, but stayed only because we did not have time before our dinner commitment to manage re-booking / relocating and already had an activity weather cancelation issue for the next day they were working on.

Fun, quirky B&B with a very nice host. Lots of personality and local history in the decor. We had a room with a lovely little sitting area over the garden that we enjoyed for several hours. Great breakfast service. Conveniently located in the arts district and just a few minutes driving from downtown Auckland. Only negative was that the bed itself was extremely hard.

Awesome views over Christchurch. Smoothest gondola I've ridden on. Great staff & lots of activities once you're at the top. The luge was very well designed and a real blast. Fun to watch others parachuting off the mountain-side and gliding down into the city, as well as the boats zipping around the lake below from the viewing platform & restaurant area.

Great way to see the lake & mountains, delicious dinner, cool old ship, and nice sheep shearing & herding demo. The boat rides were lovely bookends to the evening. Would have loved just a bit more info in the farm show on the current operations and a little more time after it to view the animals, walk the grounds, & poke around the shop.

Top quality experience all-round, and the most memorable & unique of our trip. The location is absolutely stunning - from Lake Manapouri, over the Wilmot Pass, throughout the fjord, & even at the edge of the Tazman Sea. Staff were excellent, & knowledgeable. Accommodations were even better than I expected for a relatively small ship. Meals were great, too. We had unusually pleasant weather & thoroughly enjoyed it, but now also really want to go back in the rain to experience all the wet-weather-only waterfalls.

Our driver / guide, Steve, did a great job sharing about the local area, farming / ranching practices, outdoor sports, and wildlife, while navigating the challenging route & adeptly spotting aforementioned wildlife roaming the mountains, fields, and tarns for us to view. The local chocolate & glacial spring water stop at the waterfall & cabin was an unexpected & much appreciated treat. The variety of terrain we covered in just a few hours was amazing & really helps you appreciate the ruggedness of the region.

Our tour guide, a local farmer (whose name I've blanked on already 🫠) was excellent & joined in our rental for a driving tour around the area. He gave us a great history lesson about NZ, the tribal wars, the ongoing debates in Parliament between the Maori & settlers' descendants over the terms of the original treaties, the farming history and trends, and its native forests - as we passed farms filled with sheep, cattle, dairy herds, red deer, and crops (wheat, corn, hay, alfalfa, clover, & fodder beets). After visiting a lovely little church and learning about how the settlers constructed it from native resources, we enjoyed a picnic tea service at a park, and then walked up into a small portion of protected native forest to view huge, old Tōtara tree. It was beautiful, and the ferns & moss along the walk to it were just as lovely. We then made our way over to view & learn about the huge river-water retention pools & distribution channels they constructed in the 1930's that have enabled the shareholders to triple farming capabilities in the region. Along the way, we engaged in fascinating conversations about all kinds of other topics - it was a fantastic way to get a Kiwi perspective on the world!

Great learning experience & delicious meal. Very talented staff in the show & excellent service throughout the night. The interactive activities at the learning stations were a great way to understand more about the meaning of the performance elements before seeing it & to give guests a chance to ask questions. The staff did a really nice job acknowledging it was a performance while also asking for respect of the source material & deeper meaning of some of the rituals for those participating in them. I don't know how they did it or if it was just luck, but our dinner seating couldn't have been more perfect - we were with two other young adult to middle-aged couples who all enjoyed traveling & spoke English, so had great dinner conversations, too.

Fantastic, especially for Tolkien fans! Clearly done with respect to the source material, and as magically quaint as we had hoped. The tour guide was great, dropping little tidbits about the making of all the movies & construction of the sets, but without ruining the magic behind it. (I also really enjoyed learning about the Alexanders' farm operation & how they are running the tourism stuff in parallel today.) We both loved getting to go inside the hobbit hole near the end of the tour & having a pint at the Green Dragon. There were so many opportunities for photos & just enjoying all the "Easter eggs" the designers included in each hole design - the tour could easily have been twice as long in duration for adults, but I did notice the timing was pretty perfect for the kiddos in our group.