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 there is nothing to sign up for.
How it works
Set your filters
Pick your area, your child’s age, indoor or outdoor, and free or paid. Three 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 numbers 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 They were typed in once, went three weeks out of date, and every one of them was wrong.
- • Events come from named sources — Auckland Council’s OurAuckland, aucklandnz.com, Auckland War Memorial Museum, MOTAT and Ticketmaster — plus recurring programmes maintained by hand. The feed is refreshed weekly.
- • Guides cite official pages for anything checkable: sun protection, tides, term dates, pool supervision rules, child restraint law. Each guide lists its sources at the bottom, in every language.
- • 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 affiliate links and no paid placement. Nothing on this site is ranked or included because someone paid for it. If advertising appears, it is clearly marked as advertising and it never changes what is listed or how it is ordered.
- • No photographs we do not have the right to use. Venue images are either properly credited or not shown at all; the credits page lists every one.
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.