Helicopter Taupo flights: length, price and what a landing means

Two quite different products sit under the same heading here, and telling them apart is the single most useful thing you can do before booking anything.

The near flights stay around the town and the water. They run ten to forty-five minutes and cost $124 to $479. What their descriptions name is the lake, the Waikato River, the falls at Huka, the farmland, the geothermal ground at Craters of the Moon and the Maori Rock Carvings on the shoreline. This is the group most visitors mean when they search for a helicopter Taupo flight, and it is where the cheapest fares are.

The far flights go south to the volcanic plateau. They run twenty to fifty minutes and cost $620 to $1,128, because most of the time in the air is spent getting there and back. Their descriptions name Tongariro, the cone of Ngauruhoe, Mount Ruapehu, the Tama Lakes and the Central Plateau.

The gap between the two groups is not gradual. There is nothing on this list between $479 and $620: you are either doing the water or doing the mountains. A third option exists in the ninety-minute alpine flight at $795, which does both and puts the aircraft down in the snow partway through.

The odd-looking prices on this list all come from the same thing: distance, not time.

Compare two flights in the far group. One is listed at fifty minutes for $620. The other is listed at twenty minutes for $733. The shorter flight is the more expensive one, and it is more expensive by a wide margin. Read as a rate, the fifty-minute flight works out at about $744 an hour, while the twenty-minute one works out at roughly three times that.

The same pattern runs through the whole list. The ninety-minute alpine flight with the landing is the cheapest hour in the air among the scenic flights here, at about $530 an hour, even though its fare of $795 is one of the two highest here. The ten-minute flight at $124 is the cheapest thing to buy and around $744 an hour to fly.

So there are two ways to shop, and they give different answers. If your budget is a fixed number, sort by fare and the short water flights win. If you want the most flying for the money, sort by the hourly column in the table below and the long flights win. Neither way is wrong; they are simply different questions, and the helicopter Taupo price table on this page shows both columns side by side so you do not have to do the arithmetic.

One more thing worth knowing about a helicopter Taupo booking: the listings are filed under four different locations — Taupo, Taupo District, Karapiro and Waikato. That is a cataloguing detail rather than a description of where you meet, but it does mean the departure point is not identical for every flight, and it is worth reading the meeting instructions on the listing you choose rather than assuming they all start in the same place.

This is a small niche and it deserves an honest paragraph rather than a marketing one.

Across all eleven flights there are 35 reviews in total. Six of the eleven listings have no reviews at all yet. The best-reviewed flight here holds 4.6 from 17 reviews, which is the largest single body of feedback on the list and still a modest one. The ten-minute flight to the falls holds 5.0 from 13 reviews. Two flights show 5.0 from one review each, and one shows 5.0 from three — scores that are true as far as they go, but that rest on very little.

Taken together the eleven listings average 4.81, weighted across those 35 reviews. That is a good number and we are not going to pretend it is a large one. What it tells you is that the reviews that do exist are consistently good ones. What it cannot tell you is how one listing compares with another, because most of them have nothing to compare.

Our practical reading: where two flights cover similar ground, the one with reviews behind it is the safer booking, and where a listing is new, the thing to judge it on is what its description actually promises. That is why the comparison on this site leans on length, fare and route rather than on stars.