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Marketer’s dream (from left): Renee Little, Playboy playmate Jordan Monroe and Jenny Hodgson at the Cocktail World Cup in March
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Predictions
- An AFL team will visit Queenstown for a training stint and at least one player – during a night on the tiles – will be involved in a) a controversial incident of a sexual nature, b) a fracas with a local, c) a disorderly behaviour rap or d) all three of these.
- Someone doing something daft on Lake Wakatipu will pay for it with their life.
- A new bar will open – and the owner will say something like: “There’s always room for one more well-run, quality establishment, blah blah blah ...”
- A tourist from the UK or Australia will be arrested for urinating against a downtown shop window (actually, that happens every week).
- A new jetboat company will apply for consent to operate – and the owner will say something like: “There’s always room for one more well-run, quality tourism operation, blah blah blah ...”
- The marketing geniuses behind Kiwi booze success story 42 Below Vodka – now owned by Bacardi – will bring their Cocktail World Cup to Queenstown and get acres of media publicity for what is essentially an in-house competition aimed at getting acres of media publicity. Ah well, it is a lot of fun.
- A local real estate agent will defy national and worldwide doom and gloom with the astute anaylsis that Queenstown is, once again, bucking the trend. “Blah, blah, blah, bla-blah. Yep, it’s all looking pretty good.”
- Auckland International Airport, with its 24.99 per cent shareholding, will float the idea of buying an even larger slice of Queenstown Airport Corporation – and an Auckland executive will sell the idea to the Wakatipu public by saying something like: “It’s a win-win, blah blah blah ... with synergies that include blah blah blah.”
- The Highlanders will make the Super 15 semi-finals for the first time in, like, years.
Hopes
- Wakatipu High’s new principal doesn’t resign and isn’t sacked – not for 12 months, anyway.
- Anyone who goes heli-skiing or heli-boarding, does so with an emergency airbag strapped to them in case of an avalanche.
- No companies mount frivolous and anti-competitive Environment Court actions that end up costing everyone a lot of time and money.
- People start urinating in toilets, as opposed to doorways and on the windows of shops.
- No more city-flattening earthquakes would be nice.
- Trenz goes off – just like it did when Queenstown hosted it for the first time earlier this year.
- It snows early enough for NZSki to open on time.
- But not so much that it shuts the entire town down for three days.
- No one taking part in Winter Festival charity boxing night The Thriller in the Chiller gets a brain bleed during sparring and has to have emergency surgery.
- More schools are built.
- A two-laner replaces the Kawarau Bridge.
- Someone famous visits, gets up to no good in a downtown bar, and a righteous bouncer puts the CCTV footage up on YouTube so people can judge for themselves and media can have a field day (just kidding).
- Authorities leave Bunker bar alone after 10pm.
- Winter Festival boss Simon Green turns the Village Green into an ice rink again – it was so cool.
- Someone caps bar licences. I mean, $2.50 handles of beer is great and all, but it’s starting to get just a bit ridiculous. Isn’t it?
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