Deciding where to stay in Queenstown
Written on Saturday, 27 February 2010 by NZTravelInsider
Booking accommodation in Queenstown for April did not turn out to be an easy task. Read about how I went about researching accommodation in Queenstown trying to decide where to stay and came up empty-handed.
Have you ever done so much research that in the end you did not know where to stay?
Well… that happened to me in this past week when I was trying to finalize the accommodation bookings for my trip to the South Island in April.
I decided that I wanted to first stop in Twizel and do at least two walks in this area.
I won’t reveal which walks (for security reasons, but also not to spoil the fun if you’re looking forward to reading my day walk reports), but can tell you that they aren’t walks that are listed by the Department of Conservation, so are trails that are pretty unknown and as a consequence uncrowded.
Anyway, finding accommodation in Twizel was not that difficult, because you don’t have much choice. So I quickly decided to stay at a motel I had stayed at before.
The second part of my April trip, I wanted to spend down in Central Otago and especially Queenstown. I hadn’t decided yet what I would be doing in Queenstown, but I knew I wanted to visit it again. So I naturally started looking for hotels in Queenstown to stay at.
But while doing research, I wound up in an endless loop, where I would find a hotel which looked OK to stay at, then go read reviews on the hotel, skip the reviews with Excellent and Very good ratings and go straight to the reviews that rated the hotel as Poor or Terrible, read about the horrible things people went through, and then discard the hotel as being suitable to stay at.
During the amount of years I’ve been on the Internet, I’ve learned one thing about reading reviews: Don’t believe everything you read, but if three seemingly unrelated people complain about the same thing, that should go up as a red flag. The opposite is also true, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
In the end I got tired of looking for accommodation in Queenstown, and since there are several reasons for me not to stay in Queenstown in April – one of which being having a very long drive on my last day – I decided to stay at a motel in Cromwell, one of 4 South Island motels I regularly stay at.
There are many other things I learned about accommodation in Queenstown while I was researching accommodation in Queenstown, which I’ll share with you in the future articles in the How-To Travel Guide section I’ve written about in the following article: Booking Queenstown hotels in peak and off peak season.
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