2025: New Zealand’s Largest Hotels by Rooms
New Zealand doesn’t really do mega-hotels, and yet, the country’s biggest all live in one city. Every NZ property with 280+ rooms is in Auckland. In a market built on boutiques and sub-150 key independents, 200 rooms is big, 300 is rare, 640 is a unicorn.
If you hold 300+ keys in Auckland in 2025, your enemy isn’t the hotel next door - it’s Tuesday. Horizon arrived to town, Te Arikinui Pullman landed at the terminal, voco/Express stacked sky-high—keys grew faster than the weekday reasons to sleep in them.
This ranking covers New Zealand’s largest hotels (280+ rooms, all in Auckland) and reads them through today’s lens: who has precinct gravity to hold price, the lounges/25 m pools/ballrooms that buy Tuesdays, and a playbook beyond discounting.
1. Cordis Auckland 640 rooms
Auckland’s scale leader didn’t just get bigger, it evolved. Cordis’ 17-storey Pinnacle Tower (opened December 2021) didn’t merely tack on capacity; it rebalanced the whole asset into a genuine convention-luxury hybrid: 640 keys, a rooftop pool, Chuan Spa, and one of the country’s largest executive lounges. The tower brought 244 new rooms to the renovated 411-key original, crowned by a 252 m² Chairman Suite with its own balcony fire pit and optional VIP lift, the sort of suite a small market rarely justifies, but here, it sings.
Cordis wears Auckland’s history lightly. The site once hosted Partington’s Windmill; as Sheraton Auckland in 1987, then The Langham from 2005, and Cordis since 2017, it’s a case study in brand evolution under Great Eagle / Langham Hospitality Group stewardship. The new art program threads Te Whai Ao (first light), Manawa (connection) and Kaitiakitanga (guardianship) across a Jasmax shell and Space Studio interiors, an aesthetic that quietly anchors all that scale in Auckland, not “anywhere.”
And it’s set up to earn its size. Eight, the interactive buffet with eight live kitchens, now seats 250; Our Land Is Alive pours a 100% NZ list; the meeting inventory runs 2,000 m²+, with the pillarless Great Room, the 400 m² Jade Room (with terrace), and a boardroom that belongs on a brand guidelines mood board.
2. Grand Millennium Auckland 453 rooms
If Cordis is the unicorn, Grand Millennium is the workhorse. The 12-storey atrium still does exactly what late-80s hotel architecture promised: arrive, look up, go “wow”, and then the numbers take over: 453 keys, 16 meeting spaces, a pillarless 830 m² ballroom (800 theatre / 550 banquet), plus the ~372 m² Galaxy/Tasman suite and that handsome Aucklander Room with its vaulted ceiling and private bar.
Born as The Carlton in 1989, acquired by CDL Hospitality Trusts for NZ$113m in 2006 (then NZ’s biggest hotel transaction), rebranded Grand Millennium in 2016, it’s become the reliable big-room anchor opposite Aotea Square, the place that hosts the gala, sleeps the tour group, and delivers breakfast to half a thousand without breaking a sweat.
The dining brief is quietly diverse: Katsura (teppan, sushi, kaiseki), Ember for all-day fare, Dans le Noir? for sensory theatre, and The Aviary under the glass for coffee by day and cocktails by night. There’s a heated indoor pool, a sauna, and even 250 on-site parking spaces—a luxury downtown, not just a line item.
3. Crowne Plaza Auckland 352 rooms
Perched above the Atrium on Elliott retail stack, Crowne Plaza is Auckland’s corporate metronome: 352 rooms up on levels 15–24 of a 29-storey tower (~110 m), refreshed to modern, light tones with the brand’s Sleep Advantage™ rituals. It opened in 1990 as Centra, later converted to IHG’s Crowne; today it’s owned by Colwall Property Investment.
The hotel leans into efficiency: One Twenty 8 on Albert (2023) replaced Aria with an open kitchen and a flame & smoke sensibility; meeting space tops out around 374 m² with a useful Terrace Room that actually gets people daylight; no pool, but a direct lift into the Atrium Car Park (fixed nightly rates matter when the CFO’s in town). Post-MIQ, they scrubbed up, added Chromecast in every room (2023), and carried on doing what the city’s mid-to-upper corporate set needs: reliability, location, and an easy walk to Federal Street.
4. SkyCity Hotel 323 rooms
You don’t book SkyCity Hotel for monastic calm, you book it because everything fun is an elevator ride away. Since 1996, this four-star has been the casual, family-friendly gateway into the SkyCity ecosystem: the casino (1,600+ gaming machines, 100+ tables), the 700-seat theatre, the 328 m Sky Tower, and a food & beverage constellation that runs from MASU to The Sugar Club, Orbit 360°, Depot, Federal Deli and beyond.
Rooms were last fully refreshed in 2013—double-glazed, sensibly soundproofed, and sized for the weekend crowd that watches a show, hits the tables, then orders fries at Andy’s at midnight. Breakfast is often at Fortuna; everything else is charge-backable across the precinct. An air bridge links to The Grand, a shared gym and East Day Spa sit in the middle, and now that Horizon has launched, the precinct pushes towards 1,000 rooms—a scale play few operators in NZ can match.
5. Pullman Auckland Hotel & Apartments 321 rooms
East of Queen Street above Albert Park, Pullman is the CBD’s big all-rounder: 321 keys split across hotel rooms/suites and a serviced-residence stack. The draw cards are classic five-star and unusually comprehensive for downtown: a proper Executive Lounge (06:00–22:00 with evening canapés) and Luxe Spa with a 25 m indoor lap pool, sauna, steam and spa pool. Tapestry Grill and Tapestry Bar & Terrace do the F&B lifting, dry-aged program, seafood, and a terrace that actually gets used.
Where it really leans into scale is events: 16 spaces and ~3,000 m², headlined by the pillarless 827 m² Princes Ballroom (to 750 theatre / 450 banquet) and the 690 m² Regatta Room, with terraces for cocktailing and Top of the Town up top for board-level moments.
In the bones is half a century of Auckland hotel history: opened in 1968 as Inter-Continental, later Hyatt Regency, and reflagged Pullman in 2011 under Accor. Today it reads as the east-of-Queen counterweight to the SkyCity precinct, walkable to Britomart and Spark Arena, with enough sanctuary and amenity to make longer corporate stays feel easy.
6. The Grand by SkyCity 312 rooms
Across Federal Street, The Grand is the sanctuary to SkyCity Hotel’s bustle. Opened in 2005 (cutting the ribbon: Prime Minister Helen Clark) on an NZ$85m build, it has the bones of a classic five-star: 32 m²+ rooms, a proper 25 m lap pool, sauna and spa, the East Day Spa with 12 treatment rooms (including a hammam), and a Club Lounge on level seven.
Its culinary compass has been reset elegantly: Metita (opened 2023), chef Michael Meredith’s Pacific-New Zealand lens, took over the old Gusto room and promptly earned Cuisine’s “Hotel Restaurant of the Year 2025”, a tidy proof that hotel restaurants here can be destination dining. The presidential suite? Grand piano, bullet-resistant glass, and a private internal lift, not because it’s flashy, but because sometimes Auckland hosts the sort of guest who needs both. After a MIQ stint, the hotel reopened in 2022 and resumed its role as the city’s best “retreat in luxury, play in style” proposition.
7. Te Arikinui Pullman Auckland Airport 311 rooms
Terminal-adjacent luxury is almost always an exercise in soundproofing and speed. Te Arikinui Pullman, a 50:50 joint venture between Tainui Group Holdings and Auckland Airport, adds something rarer: cultural integrity you can feel the moment you step on the terrazzo lobby floor inlaid with harbour shells.
Opened December 2023 just ~100 m from the international terminal, the building reads as a korowai: black and gold aluminum, 1,500+ unique triangular facade panels (no two alike), and a carved pou aligned to Taupiri—the spiritual thread back to the Māori monarchs whose title, Te Arikinui, the hotel carries by gift. Rooms are modern-calm, 55" smart TVs with Chromecast, blackout + circadian lighting, and the sort of acoustic glass that lets you watch a 787 rotate without hearing it. Te Kāhu restaurant and bar sits high, designed with bird-in-flight motifs and a menu that folds Māori ingredients and techniques into contemporary New Zealand cooking. The project targets 5 Green Star and threads taniwha guardian motifs into the glazing and columns, sustainability not as a checklist, but as story.
8. Horizon by SkyCity 303 rooms
The newest kid in the precinct is also the most forward-looking. Horizon opened 1 August 2024, a curved glass hotel air-bridged to NZICC on one flank and SkyCity on the other, designed so every room looks outward to the city or harbour. Rooms run roughly 22–58 m² across categories, all floor-to-ceiling glass, and a 5 Green Star design that favours smart automation and a 24/7 gym over an energy-hungry pool (the precinct already has one at The Grand).
The Grill was reborn here as both breakfast room and a serious grill by night; Onyx Bar becomes the natural lobby living room. Underneath, a new pedestrian laneway stitches the block back into the city. For Auckland’s weekday profile, the implications are straightforward: once NZICC hits its stride, Horizon is the delegate magnet that supports precinct-wide compression and rate discipline.
9. Holiday Inn Express Auckland City Centre 294 rooms
There are “select-service” hotels, and then there’s this: Holiday Inn Express stacked beneath voco in a 38-storey, 135 m tower, the tallest hotel building in the country, opened May 2022. Express gets the lower floors (~1–20), voco lives above, and the two share just enough infrastructure to let a value guest feel a little luxe without paying for it.
Rooms are compact (~18–22 m²) but bright, with floor-to-ceiling windows, 50" Smart TVs, the brand’s high-pressure walk-in showers, and sustainability choices aligned to IHG Green Engage (bulk amenities, “A Greener Stay” housekeeping opt-outs). Breakfast, free and hot/cold, runs in the Great Room (yes, there’s a pancake machine). The kicker: charge-back access to Bar Albert, the rooftop on level 38 with the best views per dollar in town, and Mozzarella & Co. in the podium. It’s the city’s best compression valve: reliable, efficient, and physically plugged into more “occasion” than the ADR suggests.
10. JW Marriott Auckland 286 rooms
Auckland’s grande dame got a very modern second act. Sold for NZ$170m in late 2022 to a CP Group / Alvarium / Archipelago consortium, the largest single-asset hotel deal in NZ at the time, the former Stamford re-opened as JW Marriott nine days after handover (15 Dec 2022). New beds (about 560), new TVs, new robes; the more fulsome transformation is being delivered in phases on a NZ$20–25m budget.
The asset has enviable bones: generously sized rooms (~34 m²), an indoor heated pool under a glass roof, proper saunas, and an events floor that can still host a serious banquet. The ground floor is being re-imagined around Trivet, a multicultural bistro that leans into Aotearoa’s ingredients and diners’ expectations today, with Forum Bar as the day-to-night social hub and a speakeasy-style concept flagged for the former Grasshopper space. Kabuki Teppanyaki’s future is evolving; the JW high tea is already a thing (NZ$69, or $85 with cocktails). It’s a rebirth story: MIQ history scrubbed away, distribution plugged into Bonvoy, and a luxury flag that knows how to work with “good bones.”
So…
Call it oversupply, call it a reset. Either way, Auckland’s advantage is operational: clusters that compress, products that buy Tuesdays, and revenue science that refuses to confuse 90% on a weak ADR with success. The hotels that win the next 12 months will architect midweek reasons to stay, anchor themselves to precinct calendars, and protect floor rates with smarter segmentation—not louder discounting.
That’s the playbook. Execute it, and scale becomes a feature, not a liability.
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About the Author
Joshua Thomas is an experienced hotelier, founder of Hospo HR & Chief Editor to Hospitality Pulse. Immersed in the latest hospitality trends, news and updates, Joshua’s passion stems from his lifelong love obsession with hotels & food. Connect with Joshua on Linkedin.
