Wave Passage is a casino hotel and resort on the Paihia waterfront, in the Bay of Islands — Pēwhairangi — at the top of the North Island. Fifty-four rooms and suites, a restaurant, a bar, a bathhouse and three event spaces, and one room where adults over twenty can play slots and table games.
The building went up in 1974 as a two-storey motor inn with a gravel forecourt and eleven units. We bought it in 2010, spent two years pulling most of it apart, and opened as a hotel in 2012. The kauri sills in three of the Waitangi Suites are the only original timber left inside; everything else is newer than it looks, which is the honest version of the story.
What the resort actually is
Most people come here for the water. The passenger ferry to Russell leaves from the wharf four minutes’ walk away and runs every twenty minutes until ten at night. The boats out to Cape Brett and Motukōkako — the island with the hole through it — go from the same wharf at nine in the morning. Waitangi is twenty-five minutes on foot across the bridge.
And in the evening there is The Motukōkako Room, which is one room on the ground floor with 34 machines and 6 tables in it, open midday to 2am, for guests and visitors aged twenty and over. It is a part of what we offer and we do not hide it. It is also, in floor area, about a twelfth of the building.
There is no fitness suite, no business centre and no third restaurant that opens when the first one is full. There are six things, they are all named, and every one of them has a person in charge of it who has been here longer than three years.
- Rooms and suites. 54 of them, five categories, from NZ$229 a night.
- The Tapeka Room. 74 covers, breakfast and dinner, seven days.
- The Motukōkako Room. 34 machines, 6 tables, midday to 2am, 20 and over.
- The Haruru Bathhouse. A salt pool, two hot tubs and four treatment rooms.
- Three event spaces. 132 m², 58 m² and 26 m², all on the water side.
- Packages. Six of them, priced per package, not per person per night.
Rooms & Suites
Fourteen on the road side and forty facing the water, from a 22 m² Marsden Room to three top-floor suites with a terrace apiece.
The Tapeka Room
Breakfast from 6.30am and dinner from 5.30pm, with a set four-course menu that changes when the boats and the growers change it.
The Motukōkako Room
34 slot machines and 6 tables — blackjack, roulette, baccarat and a poker table Thursday to Sunday.
Packages
Two nights and the Russell ferry, two nights and the run out to the Hole in the Rock, or two nights and the bathhouse.
The Haruru Bathhouse
A 14 m salt pool, two hot tubs on the north terrace, and treatments from twenty-five minutes to two hours.
Meetings & Events
The Urupukapuka Room, The Moturua Room and The Opua Room, all on the water side with daylight in them.
The Tapeka Room seats 74 and takes its name from the point at the north end of Russell, which you can see from eleven of the tables. Breakfast runs 6.30am to 10am and dinner 5.30pm to 9.30pm, seven days. The kitchen buys snapper and kingfish off the boats at Opua, oysters from Orongo Bay, and everything green from two growers at Kerikeri.
The Longboat Bar is the smaller room off the lobby, open midday to midnight, with 41 New Zealand wines by the bottle and eleven by the glass. Nine of the eleven are from Northland, which is a smaller wine region than most people expect and a better one.
Room service runs 6.30am to 10.30pm from a shorter card. After that the night porter can make you a sandwich, and does.
One room, ground floor, north-east corner, 34 slot machines and 6 tables. Blackjack and roulette from midday, baccarat from six, and a dealer-run hold’em table Thursday to Sunday from seven. The Cape Brett Table is the high-limit room behind the door at the back, by arrangement with the duty manager.
Entry is twenty and over with photo ID, every time, including guests of the hotel and including people the staff recognise. There are no cash machines on the gaming floor, there is a clock visible from every table, and the room closes at 2am whether or not anyone wants it to.
Everything here happens in the building. There is nothing on this website to play and no way to gamble from a phone.
The Haruru Bathhouse takes its name from the falls four and a half kilometres up the Waitangi River, where haruru means the noise the water makes. Ours is quieter: a 14 m salt pool, two hot tubs on the north terrace that hold six between them, four treatment rooms and a steam room. Open 7am to 9pm. Free to guests; NZ$45 a day for visitors, and the number is capped at thirty-five so it never stops being a place you can hear yourself in.
3 event spaces
All three are on the water side and all three have daylight, which is not true of most conference rooms in this country. They are listed below with the numbers that decide whether a room works: floor area, and how many people fit in it three different ways.
| The Urupukapuka Room | 132 m² | 140 standing, 100 seated for dinner, 80 in rows. Ground floor, opening onto the north terrace. Blackout blinds, a 4.2 m ceiling, and a service door that means the kitchen never crosses the room. |
|---|---|---|
| The Moturua Room | 58 m² | 32 in rows, 24 in a U, 18 around one table. First floor, east light all morning. The one we use for training days. |
| The Opua Room | 26 m² | 12 around the table. Second floor. One table, twelve chairs, a screen, and a door that shuts on the corridor. |
Fourteen rooms look at the road and forty look at the water, and we charge about sixty dollars a night less for the road. Rates below are the lowest of the year, which in Paihia means June and July.
Marsden Room
The smallest rooms in the house, facing Marsden Road rather than the water, and priced for it.
Bay Room
Our standard room and the one most guests end up in. East-facing over the water to Motumaire and Russell beyond it.
Passage Room
A 5 m² balcony with two chairs and a table wide enough for two plates, not just two glasses.
Waitangi Suite
A sitting room with a door that shuts, which matters when one of you is working and the other is not.
The Motukōkako Suite
Three of them, each with a 20 m² terrace looking straight out at the islands, and a bath you can see them from.
Booking one
There is no booking engine on this site. You send an enquiry, a person at reservations reads it between 7am and 8pm, and you get a reply the same day. It is slower than a button and it goes wrong far less often.
There are about a hundred and forty islands out there depending on what you are willing to call an island. The ones that matter to most guests are Urupukapuka, which has a boat every morning and three walking tracks on it, Moturua, which has four bays and no shop, and Motukōkako at the far end, which is the one with the hole through it.
The concierge desk books boats, not adventures. If the forecast says the swell will keep the skipper out of the hole, you will be told that before you pay rather than after.
Everything worth walking or driving to is below, with the distance from our front door rather than from the middle of town.
| Paihia wharf and the ferry | 350 m | Four minutes along the seafront. We hold bags either side of a sailing. |
|---|---|---|
| Paihia village and the shops | 260 m | Three minutes. The bakery on Williams Road opens at six. |
| Russell, Korōrareka | 2.6 km | Across the water. Passenger ferry every twenty minutes, 7am to 10pm, fifteen minutes each way. |
| Waitangi Treaty Grounds | 2.1 km | Twenty-five minutes on foot over the bridge, or six by car. Open 9am to 5pm. |
| Haruru Falls | 4.8 km | Seven minutes by car, or ninety minutes on the boardwalk through the mangroves at low tide. |
| Opua car ferry | 6.5 km | Nine minutes south. Runs every ten minutes, 6.50am to 10pm. |
| Motukōkako, the Hole in the Rock | — | Forty minutes out by boat from the wharf. Cape Brett is the headland before it. |
The short version
Twenty and over, photo ID at the door every time. No cash machines on the gaming floor and none in the corridor outside it. A clock visible from every table. The room shuts at 2am. Staff on the floor are trained to notice someone who has stopped enjoying it, and are expected to say something rather than wait.
Self-exclusion is available confidentially and in writing at reception or by email to [email protected]. It takes about ten minutes and no one else in the building needs to know.
- NZ Gambling Helpline — 0800 654 655, free, 24 hours
- Need to Talk? — call or text 1737
- Problem Gambling Foundation — 0800 664 262
- Text 8006 · choicenotchance.org.nz
One form, one person reading it. Tell us what you want and we will tell you whether we have it.
Paihia 0200
Bay of Islands, Northland
+64 9 402 7194 — reservations, 7am–8pm
[email protected]
