About Tania Rewi
I am Tania Rewi. I live above Oneroa on Waiheke Island, I have been here eleven years, and I catch the 7:00am off the island most weekdays. This site is the thing I would have liked to hand the visitors I keep meeting on the wharf: an independent guide to getting to Waiheke by ferry and to spending the day here once you land. I am not a ferry company and I am not a tour operator.
Why I started it
Standing on the 7:00am you hear the same conversations on repeat, and one of them is about money. People pay the on-peak fare for a sailing they had no reason to be on, because every search result tells them to hunt for a cheaper day and the fares do not vary by day at all. They vary by time. Leave Auckland from 1pm and the adult return drops by NZ$15.50. That one correction is worth more than most of what is written about this crossing, and it took me about a year of overhearing it to decide to write it down properly on the fare page.
The second conversation is about cars. The single biggest cluster of questions people ask search engines about this island is whether they need to bring one. They do not, and the buses, bikes, taxis and walks are all covered honestly, including what I could not verify about them.
How I work, and what I will not do
Every number on this site was checked against a primary source on 12 August 2026 — the operators’ own published fares, Auckland Transport’s own wording, each tour’s own listing. Fares were revised in February 2026 and are still moving, so pages that quote one say when it was checked and tell you to confirm before you travel.
Where I could not confirm something, the page says so rather than filling the gap. There is no sea distance in kilometres on this site, because no operator publishes one. There is no best winery, because ranking them would be an opinion dressed up as a fact. There are no accommodation prices, because I did not verify any and I do not sell rooms. And on free travel for seniors I have printed a flat contradiction between the government’s own page and all four operators, linked both sides, and told you to ring the operator, because that is the truthful answer and a made-up one would rank better.
The reviews work the same way. I quote real travellers word for word, typos included, and I use the critical reviews as well as the glowing ones. Where a listing’s reviews are plainly describing a different product — which happens on the plain ferry ticket — I say so instead of counting them towards a score.
How the site is paid for
Booking links here go to GetYourGuide, and if you book through one I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. That is what pays for the site. It has not stopped me writing that three of the eight tours leave the ferry out of their price, that one of them has only 35 reviews, or that a lunch somebody paid for arrived overcooked. The full picture is in the affiliate disclosure.
Found something out of date, or something I have got wrong? Tell me. Corrections are the most useful mail I get. If you would rather just read the whole thing in one piece, start with the ferry guide.