Auckland Weekend Planner
Auckland Weekend Planner helps Auckland parents decide where to take the kids — fast. Instead of an endless event feed, it is a short, curated list of family-friendly places you can filter by your child’s age, the weather and your budget. It is free, independent, and you don’t need an account to use it (the weekly email is optional).
How it works
Set your filters
Pick your area, your child’s age, indoor or outdoor, and free or paid. A few taps, no sign-up.
The weather is already factored in
Live Auckland weather loads with the page. On a wet or windy day the list shifts to put indoor places first.
Every card carries the deciding details
Age range, rough cost, how long it takes, and whether a pram gets in — plus parking, toilets and a café. Those are the facts that decide whether an outing works with a small child.
How we check things
Listings are only worth something if they are true. This is what actually happens behind each one.
- • Every place is added by hand. Nothing on this site is auto-generated from a directory, and no venue is invented to fill a category.
- • Existence is checked, not assumed. Each venue was verified against its operator’s own page and Google Places. Two passes over the restaurant list removed the ones that had quietly closed or were the same place listed twice.
- • Coordinates are checked too. Ten venues turned out to be pinned to the wrong building, which matters more than it sounds when you are driving with tired children.
- • Closed places stay visible but stop being recommended. A venue that has shut is kept in the list with a note, and excluded from every "what should we do today" suggestion — so a rainy-day pick never sends you to a pool that has been demolished.
- • The counts on this site are read from the database, not typed in by hand. They were typed in once, went three weeks out of date, and every one of them was wrong. Figures written into the guides are checked against the database by an automated test.
- • Events come from named sources — Auckland Council’s OurAuckland, aucklandnz.com, Auckland War Memorial Museum, MOTAT, Auckland Botanic Gardens, Ticketmaster and Eventfinda — plus markets, libraries, pools and holiday programmes we keep by hand. Most sources are refreshed daily; a couple of council and ticketing listings weekly (daily during school holidays).
- • Guides cite official pages for anything checkable: sun protection, tides, term dates, pool supervision rules, child restraint law. Every guide shows its sources in every language — linked in the text where the fact appears, or listed at the end.
- • When we get something wrong we fix it and say so. The sun-protection season was a month too narrow at each end, and the museum admission policy was stated backwards. Both were found by going to check the source.
Where the data comes from
OpenWeather
The live Auckland forecast behind the indoor/outdoor hint.
Google Maps and Google Places
One-tap directions, and the second opinion we check venue details and opening status against.
Wikimedia Commons
Where most venue photographs come from. Every one is listed with its licence on the credits page.
What this site deliberately does not do
- • No individual venue pages in search. Each place has a detail page, but they are kept out of search results on purpose: with the information we can honestly verify from a desk, they would be mostly template, and a page that is mostly template is not worth anyone’s click.
- • No paid placement. Nothing on this site is ranked or included because someone paid for it. A few paid attractions carry a ticket link that earns us a commission — it says so beside the link, it costs you nothing extra, and it never changes what is listed or how it is ordered. If advertising appears, it is clearly marked as advertising.
- • No photographs we do not have the right to use. Venue photos come from Wikimedia Commons and are credited one by one on the credits page; cards without a suitable licensed photo show a simple category picture (an emoji or icon), never a stock photo that could be mistaken for the real place.
Found something wrong?
Opening hours, prices and facilities change, and we would rather hear about it than have you drive there and find out. Every correction sent through the contact page is read, and the listing is checked against the operator before anything is changed.