Each of the just six rooms afford lake and mountain views beyond an extended lawn (perfect for dramatic and convenient chopper landings for aerial tours of the mountains) and feature walk-in wardrobes, writing desks, Bose sound systems and complimentary Wi-Fi. The starkly simple, homestead-like main lodge building also boasts the Southern Alps - the highest mountain range in Australasia with 16 peaks above 3000 metres - as its backdrop visible from every suite. It's perched on a hillside about 50 metres above the wondrous, 42-kilometre-long Lake Wanaka, just outside the inoffensive eponymous resort town, about an hour's scenic drive across the Crown Range from Queenstown. Whare Kea, which I visited not long ago, is, typical of a New Zealand lodge - dramatically located. They manage to be friendly yet not excessively familiar. Somehow the more reserved national demeanour of the New Zealander seems to make him or her better suited to service at this level of travel than Australians, especially when you consider the fact that tourism is one of the two most important earners of foreign exchange for the Kiwi economy. So just what is it about the Kiwis that allowed them to create such unique places, attracting wealthy guests from Europe, North America, and more lately Australia? He went on to open an award-winning, all-Australian lodge, with more belatedly following. ![]() I know one shrewd Australian operator, determined to replicate the Kiwi lodge model on his own terms, who spent a fortnight travelling around New Zealand taking notes. ![]() It's been akin to the hospitality equivalent of the All Blacks' dominance of the Wallabies in rugby union: you win some, you lose many. Certainly, the widespread international recognition of New Zealand's lodges (though few, if any, to my knowledge, are run at a profit) has long been the subject of near 100 per cent irritation from their Australian tourism counterparts. They offer a model an envious Australian tourism industry has only most recently managed to emulate in the form of the internationally lauded Kangaroo Island's Southern Ocean Lodge and Tasmania's Saffire Freycinet. While New Zealand, due to its size, has relatively few true five-star hotels, its network of luxury lodges now extends from the top of the North Island to the bottom of the South Island.īy submitting your email you are agreeing to Nine Publishing's Compare that with Japan's ryokans or Spain's paradores, whose origins stretch back centuries, and you realise how much those canny Kiwis have achieved. The first luxury lodge, Huka, opened in the 1920s but most of the others, including Whare Kea, have been established only in the past few decades or so. Indeed, I've long admired what the New Zealanders have achieved with their lodges in a relatively short time. Perfection, if you can afford it, what with the heady nightly rates asked for this level of accommodation, is at the essence of the Kiwi concept of a luxury lodge, and faux pas usually don't get more trifling than the above. Photo: AlamyĪh, New Zealand luxury lodges: perfect one day, near perfect the next. "But it won't be perfect," she says.ĭramatic: the view from Whare Kea. Just as my kindly middle-aged waitress places my caffe latte order on the dining table before me some of the contents spill into a saucer, forming a little brown moat around the bottom of the glass. ![]() But I remain seated, transfixed by the wraparound views, more or less mandatory at a salubrious New Zealand lodge such as this one.
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