Pacific Magazine > Magazine > September 1, 2002

Travel

Discovering Aitutaki

By Robert Keith-Reid

Short of some global catastrophe, Cook Islands tourism is bound to grow. Americans adore Rarotonga. "It’s just like Hawai‘i used to be," many of them exclaim. They mean as it was more than 50 years ago.

Now they and others are discovering Aitutaki, 140 miles north of Rarotonga. With its lagoon and easy style, it has enormous appeal. It makes Rarotonga seem overdeveloped and overcrowded.

Pearl Beach Resort, Aitutaki, Cook Islands. PHOTO: Robert Keith-Reid

"Until a year ago, Pearl Beach was the only resort of its kind here, but the Are Tamanu opened a year ago in May with 12 units and is doing well," says Jean-March Petin, Pearl Beach’s general manager. "There is no doubt that traffic will increase. Aitutaki is becoming a destination of its own. It’s not just an add-on to Rarotonga any longer. It’s no longer a day-trip destination."

In October, the first 25 units of the ultimately 75-room Pacific Resort Aitutaki is due to open, owned and run by the Pacific Resort at Rarotonga. The Aitutaki Pearl Beach Resort (www.pearlresorts.com/aitutaki/main.asp) has origins dating back 20 years. It was taken over some years ago by French Polynesian businessmen who operate a chain of similarly named resorts in their home islands. The resort stands on 10 hectares of land on a motu (islet) at one end of the Aitutaki mainland, joined to the mainland by a 50-meter-long bridge. The resort has its own water supply and treatment plant and hopes to win an envi-ronmental standards prize. "We are very ecological, very clean," Petin says. Resort infrastructure as it stands would allow for the resort to double in size, but there are no immediate plans for doing that.

"We are no longer alone and traffic is not so much that there is enough for everyone. Air New Zealand is the only airline running to the islands; that’s where the problem lies. The Cook Islands is a nice stopover, but it is not a money-making stopover."

Aitutaki has a resident population of about 1,200 people. As with others in the Cook Islands it is suffering from population drain caused by migration. Tourism, as it is blossoming now, could arrest this.