Luxurious Okawa Bay Resort, Maori Initiative

Tu Tangata, Issue 34, 1 February 1987, Page 8

Luxurious Okawa Bay Resort, Maori Initiative

na Michael Romanos

Upmarket and lavish, the Okawa Bay Lake Resort is the single largest Maori development in the tourist industry.

Six and a half million dollars is being pumped into this uncluttered complex, located on the banks of Lake Rotoiti. Owned by 189 members of the Ngati Pikiao sub-tribe, the hotel is sited on six acres of prime land. The hotel opened its doors on December 2, 1985 after

three years of planning and construction.

The resort is built on a tranquil and charming curve on the very first Lake Rotoiti bay one hits after travelling 14 km east of Rotorua’s front-line street.

Originally a sawmill operated on the land and beneath the waters of Okawa Bay I’m told that hundreds of kauri logs still rest, maturing nicely over a period of 50 years. For the past 20 years up until 1983, the area was used as a motor camp.

The camp gradually became decrepit and when the camp lease had expired, Logan Hall, one of the land owners and a retired Auckland businessman in the food and clothing industries, put forward the scheme to convert the land into a hotel.

Hall argued that the site was too good for just another motor camp. Initially a family-type hotel was envisaged but the final plan which followed market research, was for an upmarket hotel resort.

Hall had a hard time convincing the other 188 owners who had already formed a 438 Maori Trust a legal business entity. Eventually Okawa Bay Lake Resort Trust was set up, with a group of six people appointed to represent the owners, administer the trust and oversee the hotel.

‘Time-Sharing’ on part of the complex was incorporated solely to bring in ready cash. The trust employed Hall Group Ltd to develop the resort. Equity Corporation had a 49 percent interest in the Hall Group company.

With a projected four and a half million dollars expenditure, construction started in 1984 for a “five star-plus” resort consisting of 43 hotel rooms and 15 time-share condominiums (each housing up to six people). Today the resort boasts three and a half acres of grounds, a heated swimming pool, spa pools, saunas, tennis courts, a fullyequippped gym, a restaurant and bar, and the key amenity of a marina; which is the springboard for water skiing, trout fishing and pleasure boating on

the lake. Lake Rotoiti is excellent for boating but it is a hard-fishing lake which apparently produces a very good con-dition-factor rainbow or brown trout. In fact the resort celebrated its opening day with someone catching a 15 pound rainbow trout. One can hire speed boats and cruiser fishing boats from a company associated with the resort.

But the Okawa Bay Lake Resort could become less attractive in the near future. There is the grave danger of Lake Rotoiti becoming heavily polluted within the next decade which will result in loss of marine life and other unsavoury aspects. This is due to the overflow of sewage pollution from Lake Rotorua. Steps are being taken to alleviate this problem but it seems a distinct possibility the situation will get much worse before any improvement will be apparent.

My wife Leigh and I were fortunate to experience two days at the resort last October. The staff was most friendly, the service good, the amenities first rate and the decor splendid.

The views from the hotel would be heaven for tired city business folk. One major distraction was the prominent hill on the opposite side of the resort had recently been cleared of gorse and entirely inappropriately, the Rotorua City Council were preparing to plant pine trees all over the hill rather than native trees, bushes and plants. The luxuriously appointed hotel

rooms, which cost guests between $l2O to $220 per unit, include complimentary toiletries, video channels, a well stocked mini-bar and tea and coffee making facilities.

The 189 owners provided no capital outlay - just the land. The trustees who continue to have complete control over the project, re-employed the Hall Group to sell time-share. By the end of 1986 it’s hoped the time-share would have been completely sold to bring in a gross of nearly four million dollars.

Time-Share is a holiday home ownership plan which allows you to buy a share in a resort condominium. It enables you to freeze future holiday accommodation costs at today’s prices.

The Okawa Bay resort has one-week time-sharing encompassing 20 years. The current prices for buying into the scheme are $6,300 for floating timeshare and SIO,OOO for fixed time-share. Ownership entitles you to exclusive use of a luxurious condominium (which comes complete with everything from a washing machine to an alarm clock) for a pre-determined segment of time, every year for 20 years. The share may be rented, sold or passed on in your estate. It can be exchanged on a yearly basis with other hotels or motels in New Zealand and overseas. The only annual cost is a service fee. The initial outlay is recoverable after 20 years.

Time-Share is the major scheme to get this hotel-resort out of serious financial difficulties.

The original cost estimates escalated by some two million dollars mainly through off-shore borrowing currency fluctuations and increased local costs for construction particularly when further upgrading was decided upon.

All this brought the hotel into a debt situation which the hotel couldn’t service. As a result of this the Maori Trustee in Wellington injected over one million dollars last September which helped to reduce the debt to a more serviceable level.

The resort manager, 39 year old Bill McDonald said the hotel is performing to its expectations.

A vastly experienced hotel operator, McDonald said that all hotel investments are long term for profitability and he expects the owners of Okawa Bay will not start to receive dividends before 1989 or 1990.

McDonald said one of the major problems in the hotel industry in New Zealand is the lack of trained staff and the Okawa Bay Lake resort has been caught in the same situation.

McDonald employs 30 staff of which 50 percent are Maori which McDonald says is purely based on a suitability of the applicant.

“We’ve had no directives from our trustees about staffing,” he says. “We have not got a Maori on the man-

agement side but that is because we have no one with the necessary experience.”

McDonald admitted there had been water weed problems in the bay area, largely he says because of nutrients oozing over from nearby Lake Rotorua. He says spraying by helicopters and the natural use of swans are having a marked success. Certainly, I didn’t notice any weeds surfacing.

McDonald refused to allow me to interview any of his staff because he said he had a policy of himself being the only spokesperson when dealing with the media.

I would like to have asked the resort’s charming Maori receptionist, Nikki Shortland if she would like to see this Maori-owned complex portray a more Maori image. Perhaps even a few words of Maori greeting would not go amiss.

McDonald who has managed hotels in several towns and cities thinks the Okawa Bay Lake Resort compares very favourably with those he has been associated with.

“It’s a very unique resort. Physically it is very attractive. It offers to our guests a ‘complete’ resort - its location on a lake and its amenities. It’s the only resort in New Zealand at present that mixes time-share and hotel.”

McDonald makes no concessions for the high price of dinners in the restaurant. The main courses start at s2l. “We employ the two best chefs we can find. We cater at the top end of the market. We’re there for the overseas

traveller who is looking for five-star top rating hotels.”

Whilst I have heard at first hand two criticisms of the restaurant meals, I couldn’t really fault the room service meals Leigh and I had on both nights nor the two superb breakfasts we had in the restaurant.

The 50-person conference room is regarded as the hotel’s best source of business. They had 44 three-day conferences at the hotel between December 1985 and October 1986 and there were another 12 conferences booked for the remainder of the year. Bookings for 1987 were coming in thick and fast.

P.S. Tu Tangata’s Editor got a chance to try out the resort when he stayed on for a magazine publishers conference. Although there were no faults with the facilities, [even finding time to try the all-weather tennis courts), the resort lacked presence which was especially strange being in the heartland of Ngati Pikiao. The one concession to the tangata whenua were the two stained glass panels in the entranceway depicting tupuna who came on the Te Arawa waka, and two taniwha on a panel facing Lake Rotoiti. I talked with some of the staff and found local Maori are amongst them and very much enjoying their work. However one staffer who found it hard to accept the throwing out each morning of the empty complimentary toiletry containers each bearing the Okawa Bay Resort crest. The editor for his part took his home as a gift for his wife.