The Astro Edit: What Stayed With Us From AHICE Aotearoa 2026

We've just wrapped AHICE Aotearoa 2026, and it felt like a room already looking forward to the season ahead. Hamilton announced two new hotels on the back of its Pullman opening next year, and Christchurch is counting down the days until its new Sheraton opens in 2027. Design got its own dedicated stage for the first time this year, too. Here's what stuck.

Design INN: The Interior Design Panel

AHICE Aotearoa gave design its own stage for the first time this year, called Design INN. Hosted by Monique, an Auckland-based interior designer from Space Studio, the panel brought together Scott, Philip, Mark, and our own Reuben Beatson.

Monique opened with a simple question: what makes a hotel feel like it genuinely belongs somewhere, rather than just being located there?

Scott went first, and pointed straight at storytelling: "We should probably always take the opportunity to present something that's distinctly of place. It's one of the most authentic things we can do, and it's probably what sets us apart. In Aotearoa New Zealand, we have te ao Māori. It's a local culture that references landscape, the character of the community that we're in, and their relevance that couldn't exist anywhere else in the world." He described working with local iwi who generously shared ancestral stories, and what happens when a hotel earns the right to tell them: "What's really interesting is when these stories are genuinely embedded into the experience. The hotel service team inherit them and are able to convey them to the guests. It's really powerful. You get a pride and they become custodians."

Scott, a UK expat, made a second point that's easy to overlook because it's so ordinary to us: "The thing that strikes me about this place is the informality and the kind of community of it, which I think we should really lean into, like the warmth and humility. It's not like formality and tradition in my country, the United Kingdom, or in Japan, that plays a really strong role in your interaction in a hotel. We're fortunate here that it can be quite informal and welcoming, and I think that's an asset that we should play up more."

Monique pushed Mark on whether New Zealand is still building hotels that could be anywhere: "I think we're changing. I think very much so. A few years ago, from a lighting perspective, you were just asked to light up some artwork on the wall. The whole hotel is becoming an integral part of the landscape. They're learning that the hotel is an experience rather than just staying in some accommodation. And it really is changing."

Mark described two boutique hotels he'd recently stayed in, one controlled every light through an iPad, the other used plain switches: "To hear the commentary in the lobby about the iPads, there were people saying, can you just take the iPad away and give us a switch?" Scott had a name for this problem, the mother test: "When you go into a room and you have to possibly either turn off fifteen independent lights or work with some kind of complex iPad, my mother wouldn't have it. She would go, this doesn't work."

The host then asked where design actually makes money, not just where it looks good. Philip raised a cost almost no design brief accounts for: "Getting down to the detail of making beds, you don't want to dress them up too much, so it takes them twice as long to make it. There's a lot of those economical things in there as well."

Reuben was asked what guests notice that owners consistently underestimate: "It's what's in the guest room, the touch points within the guest room. The Lobby gives the first impression, but I think the guest room gives the lasting impression. The touch points within the room are so critical. When the team aren't there to influence the stay or the experience, it's once the guest door closes, the guest is alone. So those touch points (and there's so many within a room) I think all need to be well thought through." Monique followed with her own list of intuitive touch points, the safe where you'd expect it, the hairdryer easy to find, a switch for the kettle, and Reuben couldn't resist the punchline: "And make sure it fits under the tap." He made the same point about OS&E more broadly: "It may be small and low in value in comparison to the whole project, so it tends to get left to the last. Yet it has such a significant impact on the overall guest experience."

Mark put it plainly: "If everyone's engaged and collaborating at that concept, you can't entwine the history or the story of the hotel with all the features of the hotel, unless you are all really engaged early on at concept... We often get appointed post-design, and it's really difficult to have any sort of real influence without that early collaboration." He'd seen exactly this go wrong with acoustics: "We've all been there and worked on projects where the acoustic comes in too late, and then you need to bump up the hotel room wall by another twenty millimetres, and that affects the whole floor plan."

Panel Session: Food & Beverage

Hosted by Alison, this session brought together Michael (QT Auckland), Mina (Hyatt), Robert, who designs commercial kitchens, and Zach (CP Hotels), covering kitchen design and menu strategy.

Robert put kitchen space in blunt terms: "Every square foot within a property is revenue. It's about how we can maximise the space within a kitchen. But also the output. How can we create more output from lesser space?" The result is kitchens shrinking on purpose: "Where we can have more rooms within a hotel environment, we can create more memories."

Mina, from Hyatt, pushed back on the idea that smaller means worse, pointing to a recent Sydney opening: "Smaller kitchen doesn't mean less ambition. It's about more disciplined concepts, more operation continuity and less menu ego." The site was under four hundred square metres, one level up from the street with no passing foot traffic to rely on: "How we make the simple menus to relate to the local relevance. For Captain Bahai, honestly, it was less than four hundred square meter site area... It's where that group support comes from that makes it successful."

Zach agreed the same discipline is showing up in the menu itself, not just the kitchen: "I actually think that now the trend is moving to doing something very, very well and minimising menus. So if you look at the menus now, they have become smaller, they're more specialised, and it's all about the craft more now as well."

On what guests are paying for now, Michael named it directly: "People really want that emotional connection. They want that story. They want to know the provenance of that beef sitting on the plate. They want to know where that vegetable was picked from. They really want to know that story." Robert made the same point about where that story actually has to come from: "Being in New Zealand... very lucky with the source of products that are coming through, is to be proud of those products and have locally sourced products to come through."

Michael made a similar point about food and beverage: "You can have all the tech in the world, but food and beverage, particularly signature restaurants, it's a human touch, and that's where you build that sentimental value."

Keynote Speech: The Next Wave of Wellness in Hospitality

Delivered by Douglas, pulling from the Global Wellness Institute's annual trend research and turning it into moves a New Zealand property can actually use.

Douglas doesn't think New Zealand should be chasing anyone else's version of wellness. Alongside the natural environment, his case rested on our te reo Māori and cultural identity: "It is our hospitality, our people... so much opportunity when done authentically, done very, very well."

He then got specific about where the money sits, which is less obvious than it sounds: "The retail products, especially when complemented and supplemented with treatments, can offer a tremendous amount of opportunity."

He walked through five moves he thinks are here to stay, not a passing trend: sleep, recovery, location, connection and coherence. On sleep, he pointed to New York's Equinox Hotel at Hudson Yards as the one worth looking at. On recovery, he flagged local partners like contrast-bathing studios as a lower-cost way in for properties that can't build a full spa themselves. On connection, he made the case that wellness doesn't need to be exclusive: "It can be very accessible. The wellness aspect. How do you create environments or moments where there can be points of human connection?... You create a special experience for someone."

And on coherence, he offered a test any property can run on itself: "Is it a lolly scramble of what we think the guests are looking for, or is there a consistent throughline that is coherent and makes sense for the guests?... Are there moments and touch points throughout the entire guest experience that are holding that nurturing type environment, where they kind of see their questioning of what makes sense?"

And that's a wrap…