Queenstown Ice Arena

Queenstown Ice Arena is an indoor ice facility at 29 Park Street, on the Queenstown Gardens peninsula and within walking distance of the town centre. It is one of the few purpose-built indoor spaces of any real scale in central Queenstown, and it is actively marketed for venue hire as well as public skating.

History

Skating on the site dates to 1966, when an outdoor rink was officially opened in the Queenstown Gardens by the Minister of Tourism; contemporary accounts record a crowd of more than 2,000 at the opening. The outdoor rink closed in 1995 for financial reasons. An investor group led by Christophe Huck and Firdaus Siddick built the current indoor arena on the same site, opening in 1996 at a reported cost of around $4 million.

Facilities and capacity

The arena is built to international standard for ice hockey, curling and figure skating, and is the home venue of the Skycity Stampede in the New Zealand Ice Hockey League and the Wakatipu Wild in the New Zealand Women's Ice Hockey League. Published capacity figures are 642 seated in stadium seating, up to 1,000 standing in a concert configuration, and up to 1,200 across combined indoor and outdoor use.

On-site facilities include a café and lounge, a licensed bar, skate hire, locker rooms and customer parking.

Event configurations

The key flexibility for event organisers is the ice itself. The rink can be left in play and built into the event — skating sessions, broomball, hockey demonstrations or on-ice entertainment — or it can be covered and the boards removed to open up the full floor as a flat, column-free event space. That switch makes the same venue workable for a gala dinner, a trade display, a product launch or a performance.

The arena reports past work with film and television crews for shows and commercials, with corporate clients of varying size, and with major sporting events, conferences and product launches.

Suitability for MICE: a genuinely unusual central-Queenstown option for large-format conference dinners, awards nights, product launches and incentive activity, particularly where an organiser wants a memorable participation element rather than a conventional ballroom. Worth considering alongside other Queenstown venues when delegate numbers exceed what hotel function rooms in town can hold.