Moving the Pacific: Transport, Beds and Big Ideas for the Pacific Mini Games 2029

I've just come back from Rarotonga, where I had the pleasure of sitting down with several members of the team at CISNOC (the Cook Islands Sports and National Olympic Committee).

It was a fun conversation, and while the focus was on our sport becoming full members (we achieved this!!!), we spoke about the Pacific Mini Games and what it actually takes for a nation of around 15,000 people to host them – it is definitely a challenge for sure!

The Mini Games will bring roughly 2,000 athletes and officials from more than 20 Pacific nations and territories onto a single small island over a fortnight. When you consider in coaches, media, family, dignitaries and volunteers, it's a temporary city.

Doing that on Rarotonga – which has one main road, one international airport, and a hotel sector still recovering from the COVID years – is difficult to say the least.

A few reflections after my visit.

Getting everyone there (and around)

The single biggest constraint is air capacity into Rarotonga. International services are dominated by Air New Zealand from Auckland, with seasonal lift from Jetstar, Virgin Australia and a handful of others. Pacific teams travelling from Fiji, PNG, Solomons, New Caledonia or French Polynesia often have to route via Auckland or Sydney, which adds cost, time and carbon. Coordinating arrivals so the airport isn't overwhelmed on two or three peak days is going to take careful scheduling with the carriers, and probably some chartered lift.

Note: We experienced this ourselves...two planes arrived at the one time and it took over an hour to get through customs. Luckily there was a person singing and playing the ukulele to help!

Once on island, the challenge shifts. Rarotonga essentially has two bus routes – clockwise and anti-clockwise – and a road network that wasn't designed for fleets of team buses moving between venues. We should be thinking now about a dedicated Games transport plan: shuttle loops timed to venue schedules, priority lanes at peak times, and a clear separation between athlete transport, official transport and general traffic. Pago Pago 2019 and Saipan 2022 both offer useful lessons on how (and how not) to do this.

There's also an inter-island dimension. If any events or training camps end up on Aitutaki or the outer islands, Air Rarotonga's capacity becomes a real choke point. Worth pressure-testing those assumptions early.

The bed shortage is real and we are feeling it for an airport ADB project we are working on!

Rarotonga has somewhere in the order of 2,000–2,500 visitor beds across hotels, resorts and licensed accommodators. In a normal week, those beds are largely full with tourists – and tourism is the country's economic engine. Displacing paying visitors to house athletes is not a costless decision for the Cook Islands.

A few things worth thinking about:

• A purpose-built or modular athletes' village, even a temporary one, takes pressure off the commercial sector and keeps tourism revenue flowing during the Games. New Caledonia and Samoa have both leaned on school dormitories and modular builds in the past.

• Homestays with vetted Cook Islander families could meaningfully expand capacity, deepen the cultural experience for visiting athletes, and put money directly into local households rather than offshore-owned hotels.

• Repurposing cruise ships as floating accommodation has been done before (Sydney 2000, Rio 2016 at smaller scale) and is worth at least scoping for Rarotonga. The harbour limitations would need careful analysis.

None of these are silver bullets, but a blended approach probably gets us closer than relying on the existing hotel stock.

Funding – who actually pays?

We touched on this topic when on Island and didn't really get an answer...but it matters.

Pacific Mini Games budgets are typically funded through a mix of host government appropriation, Games-specific levies, in-kind contributions from Pacific Games Council members, and development partner support – DFAT, MFAT, the PRC, Japan, and increasingly the private sector through sponsorship.

For Cook Islands, the maths is tight. A Games budget that might look modest in Australian or NZ dollars is a substantial proportion of the national budget here. Three things stand out to me:

• First, leveraging the diaspora. There are more Cook Islanders living in New Zealand and Australia than in Cook Islands itself. A well-run diaspora sponsorship and volunteering campaign could be transformative.

• Second, infrastructure that outlasts the Games. Every dollar should be tested against the question: does this leave Cook Islands better off in 2028? Venue investments that double as community facilities, transport upgrades that benefit residents, accommodation that converts to tourism stock afterwards – these are the investments worth fighting for.

• Third, regional cost-sharing. The Pacific Games Council and participating nations have a shared interest in the Games succeeding. There may be room for a more explicit cost-sharing arrangement around things like charter flights, freight and shared technical officials.

What can we (the advisory and infrastructure community) actually do?

A few practical contributions I think are worth offering:

• A transport and demand model for the Games fortnight – arrivals, daily venue movements, peak loads – would give CISNOC and government a much sharper basis for negotiating with carriers and planning shuttle services. This is the kind of thing we do routinely for events in NZ and Australia and the methodology transfers directly.

• A bed-supply and demand reconciliation, including realistic scenarios for modular accommodation, homestays and cruise berths. Something that can be put in front of Cabinet and Treasury with confidence.

• A funding map – not just the headline contributors, but the full stack including sponsorship, diaspora, in-kind, legacy value capture, and regional cost-sharing. This kind of work helps host committees stop leaving money on the table.

• And finally, knowledge transfer. There are people in our network who ran transport and logistics for the Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games, the Solomons 2023 Pacific Games, and Sydney 2000. The Cook Islands shouldn't have to relearn lessons that have already been paid for.

Final thought

What struck me most in my conversations with CISNOC was the quiet confidence and the deep care for getting this right – for Cook Islanders, for the athletes, and for the wider Pacific.

The Mini Games are an opportunity to show what a small island nation can deliver when it leans on its strengths: hospitality, community and an unsentimental focus on outcomes.

If you've worked on Pacific or small-jurisdiction Games logistics, accommodation strategies, or event-led infrastructure financing, I'd love to compare notes.

Andrew

Meitaki ma'ata.

Andrew is a transport advisory consultant working on transport, infrastructure and major-event planning across New Zealand, Australia, Asia and the Pacific.

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Transit Trends · Andrew Collings, KA Advisory. Read and comment on the original on LinkedIn.

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