Millbrook Voted Among Best Overseas Golf Resorts

Queenstown’s five-star Millbrook resort has been named among the world’s best golf resorts in a prestigious Australian travel magazine.

The Luxury Travel and Style magazine has placed Millbrook 4^th in its list of best overseas golf resorts, behind the likes of Scotland’s legendary St Andrews course, Pebble Beach in California and the Banyan Tree in Phuket, Thailand.

In the fourth year of the annual results, the magazine says its Gold List 2008 – asking its discerning, travel-loving readers to vote on their favourite destinations – is the most comprehensive luxury travel survey ever undertaken by an Australian magazine.

Tens of thousands of magazine subscribers and clients of Virtuoso, the world’s most exclusive travel agents, completed the survey.

“It is especially rewarding to have been recognised by the readers and subscribers of Luxury Travel and Style magazine, people who travel widely and have chosen to list us among the best of the best, ” said Millbrook General Manager Jan Hunt.

In July last year, the Queenstown resort was named for the third year among the top 25 hotels in Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific, one of only four New Zealand properties to make the list in the prestigious Travel & Leisure annual World’s Best reader’s poll.

In late November, Millbrook was also official hotel for the hugely successful Michael Hill New Zealand Golf Open, an arrangement that will continue for a further two years.

Long regarded as one of New Zealand’s top golf courses, the 18-hole Sir Bob Charles-designed championship course at Millbrook resort has been on the receiving end of an extensive upgrade and modification programme.

‘Strategic bunkering’ is now the name of the game at the five-star resort, where the introduction of twenty-eight new bunkers, the remodeling of another seventeen and the removal of sixteen existing traps (all in the opening 14 holes) have made life just that little more interesting for players.

The bunker upgrades are stage one of a million dollar golf course modification and come off the back of significant recent resort investment including a $10 million villa interiors refurbishment, the refurbishment of the popular Hole In One café, the establishment of a new world class driving range facility, and work starting on a half billion dollar, 200-plus home housing development and additional nine-hole golf course.