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 they look 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 knowing, 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, with notes on where to check current details before you go.
How I work, and where I check
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.
No operator publishes a sea distance in kilometres, the wineries are not ranked here, and accommodation is outside the scope of this site. And on free travel for seniors I have linked both the government’s own page and the four operators, which currently say different things, and the clearest next step is to ring the operator.
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 describe a different product — which happens on the plain ferry ticket — I note it.
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. The tour pages still note that three of the eight tours leave the ferry out of their price, that one of them has 35 reviews, and that one reviewer’s lunch 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.