Lake Taupo helicopter rides: the five that stay over the water

Read these five listings together and the overlap is obvious. The ten-minute ride describes farmland, geothermal power stations and the Waikato River crashing into the pool below. The fifteen-minute flight covers the falls and the river too, and adds the Maori Rock Carvings from above and Craters of the Moon. The thirty-minute flight calls itself the full circuit of the town and the country around it. The forty-five-minute one is the only one of the five that names places on the far shore.

So the honest way to read the Lake Taupo helicopter rides is as one route in four lengths, plus one that leaves the pattern by landing on a hilltop. The extra money buys minutes and distance from town, not a different kind of trip.

That makes the choice simpler than it looks. Decide how long you want to be in the air, check the cost per hour rather than the ticket price, and then ask whether you want to get out of the aircraft at all.

Put the fares next to the durations and the pattern in the Lake Taupo helicopter rides comes out clearly. Ten minutes costs $124. Fifteen costs $191. Eighteen with a landing costs $226. Thirty costs $411. Forty-five costs $479.

Per hour in the air that reads very differently: the forty-five-minute circuit works out at $639 an hour, the eighteen-minute landing flight at $753, the ten-minute ride at $744, the fifteen-minute flight at $764, and the half-hour flight at $822. The cheapest ticket is not the cheapest hour, and the highest fare is not the highest hourly cost.

There is a second thing the fares hide, and it is the one difference among the Lake Taupo helicopter rides that no column in the table shows. The eighteen-minute flight is the only listing of the five in which part of what you buy is time on the ground, at Patutu Tops. Compared on air time alone it looks unremarkable; compared on what you do, it is the one that is not simply a longer or shorter version of the others.

And a third: only one of these five carries free cancellation, the eighteen-minute landing flight. If you are booking early in a trip with loose dates, that matters more than a few dollars an hour.

Between them these five listings carry 30 reviews: 17 on the fifteen-minute flight and 13 on the ten-minute one. The other three have none at all.

We are not going to dress that up. Three of the helicopter rides Taupo operators list over the water are new enough that nobody has written about them yet, and there is no way to tell you how they compare from the review record, because there is no review record. What we can tell you is what the listings themselves commit to: the minutes, the fare, the route, the group type, the cancellation terms and the notice required.

If you want a flight that other people have already been on, that narrows the Lake Taupo helicopter rides to two: the ten-minute ride and the fifteen-minute one. If you want the circuit of the water or the hilltop landing, you are booking on the listing description rather than on other travellers, and you should know that going in.