Indoor glacier gives rain the slip

Ice wall manager Kevin O'Donnell gets some hands-on experience at the Hukawai Glacier Centre at Franz Josef. Photo / supplied

Building an indoor glacier next to the real thing may sound like an unlikely business prospect but Hukawai Glacier Centre co-founder Jennie O'Loughlin believes she's identified a gap in the tourism market.

The $7 million centre at Franz Josef township - about 5km from the real glacier - opens on February 26, seven months after the building project began.

Visitors to the centre will walk through a mock rainforest - with information on the area, modelling, touch screens, audio visual panels, animation, sound effects of local wildlife and the environment - before a journey through the valley with stones underfoot and finally to a re-creation of the Franz Josef Glacier itself including ice caves and crevasses.

"A lot of people are having a lot shorter holidays now and so they come through, they stop here, might only be for a day and ... if it's pouring down with rain they hardly even get to see it [the glacier]," O'Loughlin says.

And it rains a lot at Franz Josef - about 5000mm a year.

"What we know is that there a roughly a million people going through the glacier region every year and we know that it rains a lot so we're being pretty conservative, I think, saying 100,000 [customers a year]."

At the moment there was little by way of competition on wet days, she added.

"I can see people still doing it on sunny days because I think it'll be so up there technologically ... but it's mostly the rainy days when people are bored."

Most people are expected to take about 45 minutes to make their way through the centre which will teach them about Maori legend as well as the environment.

"Rather than have it like just a museum the whole idea was trying to evoke emotion out of people."

Tourism Industry Association chief executive Fiona Luhrs says during poor weather indoor operators can provide visitors on a tight schedule with a taste of an attraction or encourage those just passing through to make a detour.

"It just gives people a reason to stay another night in an area and that's really what the regions want," Luhrs says.

"They don't want people whizzing through."

Adults will pay $28 to visit the centre after which they can relax and drink a coffee while watching people climb up what O'Loughlin says is the only indoor ice climbing wall in the Southern Hemisphere.

The wall stands 10m high, spans 200sq m and can accommodate up to 20 climbers paying between $90 and about $150 each to tackle six different ice faces providing a range of difficulty with tuition available.

Finding the money to build the centre proved to be the hardest part of the climb for O'Loughlin.

"The banks basically got excited by it but it's not in their realm of lending."

Eventually O'Loughlin and two business partners put up about a third of the money and the West Coast Development Trust lent the rest.

"I guess our philosophy is that the biggest risk we take is not taking a risk at all," she says.

O'Loughlin will even have a crack at climbing the ice wall.

"We have to ... we won't be able to live it down if we don't," she says.

"They might have to put a martini up the top for us."