Mission Bay on a sunny day: Auckland took the top two places in Australasia's most busy beaches Photo / Greg Bowker
Mission Bay on a sunny day: Auckland took the top two places in Australasia's most busy beaches Photo / Greg Bowker
Summer is coming — so, too, are the crowds. This is especially noticeable at one north Auckland beach.
Browns Bay Beach has been named as the region’s “busiest” as part of a study into visitor reviews of beaches in Australia and New Zealand.
Looking at a list of the top 150 beaches on Tripadvisor in each country and comparing them with the frequency of the word “busy”, the online travel company attempted to make an international league table for beach crowding.
Aussie and Kiwi beaches blew others out of the water.
“Australian and New Zealand beaches make up the top 10 busiest beaches in Oceania, with Browns Bay Beach in Auckland taking the top spot,” says the report by Florida Panhandle.
A full 13.33 per cent of reviews left on the Tripadvisor website mentioned how busy the North Auckland shorefront was.
New Zealand overperformed on the busiest beaches — with beaches in Auckland taking the gold and silver for most crowded seafronts, at Browns and Mission Bay. Four out of the top five were in Aotearoa, with the Coromandel’s Hot Water Beach and Abel Tasman’s Kaiteriteri Beach in fourth and fifth place for busiest beach, all with over 10 per cent of Tripadvisor reviews mentioning the crowding.
Only Australia’s Byron Bay made it into the top three, with 11.39 per cent of reviews referencing how busy it was in summer.
It’s worth noting the method shows perceived crowding rather than empirical data for bodies on the beach.
Bondi receives an average of 2.8 million beachgoers annually to its 1.1km-long beachfront, according to Destination NSW.
Perhaps the data better reflects the disappointment of some visitors not to have the beach to themselves.
New Zealand and Australia’s Busiest Beaches
Browns Bay Beach, Auckland (NZ) — 13.33%
Mission Bay Beach, Auckland (NZ) — 11.56%
Byron Bay Beach, Byron (AUS) — 11.39%
Hot Water Beach, Coromandel (NZ) — 11.10%
Kaiteriteri Beach, Abel Tasman (NZ) — 10.54%
Balmoral, Mosman (AUS) — 9.92%
Scorching Bay, Wellington (NZ) — 9.87%
The Basin, Rottnest Island (AUS) — 9.82%
Hyams Beach, Hyams (AUS) — 9.52%
Bondi Beach, Sydney (AUS) — 9%
*according to Florida Panhandle and Tripadvisor
Australia's Bondi Beach was named 10th-busiest beach in Australasia. Photo / Unsplash
The worldwide sentiment study suggested there were stretches of sea that got a lot busier than Browns Bay.
Even Auckland’s popular urban beaches were nowhere near as crowded as the strands of Europe.
All 10 of the world’s top 10 busiest beaches are in Europe. Of those, Spain has five of the top spots, with Cala Agulla in Mallorca ranking as the busiest beach overall with over a fifth (23.57 per cent) of visitor reviews mentioning the crowding.
The tiny strand on the eastern cape of Mallorca gets “ridiculously crowded in July”, according to one review.
In North America, Mexico’s Playa La Entrega, in La Crucecita, had the least space for sancastles (15.11 per cent). South America’s busiest beach was found in Brazil at Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana (8.56 per cent).
In Asia, China’s Dadonghai Beach on the southern resort of Sanya was most crowded (10.4 per cent) and Egypt’s Na’ama Bay at Sharm el Sheikh took Africa’s most packed seaside location (8.32 per cent).
