Jan Hunt - Riding to the top

She’s been at the top of hotel management starting a 40-year career overseas at just 23, also at the helm in governance for tourism nationally and some leading Kiwi companies, all not bad for a girl from Mount Nicholas Station.

Jan Hunt, now retired at 68, was among the first women to pave the way in hotel management nationally, breaking new ground for those to follow, after proving herself during a chance opportunity in Aspen at 23. While her first front of house job there was all about the skiing - the lift outside the hotel door - Jan was quickly catapulted by her Texan boss into managing that 65-room, five-star property, staying almost seven years. “I was pretty naïve, but I learned fast,” she grins. Her argument with a leading Aspen businessman that Queenstown was ‘more beautiful’ led to the two resorts’ sister city relationship.

Those home mountains beckoned, Jan returning to first manage St James Suites then as rooms division manager at Holiday Inn Queenstown, her first corporate role. “The American general manager left suddenly and they said, ‘You’re in charge!’ I was 30. I had no idea.” A new GM arrived and Jan was sent to open Holiday Inn Cairns swapping snowy mountains for humid beaches. “They’d say, ‘The temperature’s plummeted down to 26°C, don’t forget your jerseys’!”

The Asia Pacific group oversaw 74 hotels, and Jan was sent to a two-week GM boot camp in China to ensure she could hack it. “I was the only woman, and it was pretty brutal.” She did get their attention though. “They asked what we thought about being a GM in China and I said, ‘I think it’s terrible that you have call-girls’ cards inside the Bibles in your rooms’ and they took them out.”

Fortunately for Jan only male managers were sent to their hotels in China and Hong Kong as it was” too tough”. A short stint front of house at the 1200-toom Holiday Inn Beijing was testament to that. “I was just a country girl, but you had to survive and show resilience to become a GM.

“I was so ready to come home so when thunderstorms cancelled my flight from Beijing, I actually cried,” she grins.

Holiday Inn Cairns wasn’t much better with her American male boss delivering the ultimatum: ‘F Up and you’re fired!’

By now Jan, who had a tongue-in-cheek sticker on her wee car saying ‘Give blood. Play thugby’, had met her husband, former All Black Duncan Robertson, the builder repairing the bars at St James. “I remember walking up the stairs behind him thinking. ‘I’ll have a bit of that,” she grins.

Her Dad, former Lake County councillor and Mount Nicholas runholder Phil Hunt had played for Otago but the All Black thing wasn’t what wooed Jan in. However, Duncan’s rugby coaching living in Cairns for almost five years was a great way to meet people. After enduring extreme heat, maggots eating the carpet, snakes and stingers, Jan was lured back home again to manage the newly opened Millennium Queenstown for several years for CDL Hotels. She was then offered a major role at Sky City Auckland – ‘GM Attractions’ overseeing the Sky Tower Conference Centre and hotels, opening the new Grand Hotel a day before leaving. It was a huge role, but the casino GMs liked to remind her, “only 14% of total Sky revenue”.

“They were fun times. We organised the big Superyacht Race at Kawau Island – 800 superyacht owners, shipping everything in including generators,” she says. “It was a big logistical event. We did all the catering for those races, all part of the America’s Cup. Our only complaint from one of the floating gin palaces was that the water wasn’t cooled enough,” she laughs.

Around 2004 Jan returned home as GM of Millbrook Resort working for the wonderful Ishii family. “That was such a privilege,” she says.

With daughter Olivia then nine and into horses like her high-country mum, Jan got back into showjumping, reaching three-star eventing. “That no stirrups training from Dad worked,” she grins.

Jan grew up roaming the hills on Mount Nicholas with her two older sisters, riding ponies, only allowed to join Dad Phil on mustering days “when we could ride first without stirrups. The youngest, I’d be tagging along behind on the way home at night, often falling asleep on my pony.”

Mum was a strict Correspondence School teacher, all three lined up sharp at 9am in their tiny station schoolroom. “Dad taught us to tickle trout and my sister got her toe bitten off by an eel.” Riding was their life.

Boarding at St Hilda’s in Dunedin from age 10, Jan was jokingly assured, leaving in her sixth form, that it was best she did before she was expelled, having been caught for a number of hostel misdemeanors, including tucking into cheap sparkling wine and smoking rolled banana skins. They’d arrive home in the holidays on the Earnslaw or Meteor in their school uniforms, pikelets from the only downtown Queenstown café always an exciting treat.

A Comprehensive Nursing degree was followed by a psychology degree and after just one year nursing in Blenheim Jan was off on her OE to Aspen.

With Olivia having followed Mum into the ring, competing internationally in the NZ U21s, the pair are now launching Southern Lakes Equestrian Centre on the family’s Speargrass Flat farm.

Jan’s spent nine years on the Showjumping NZ Board overseeing high-performance show jumping. She’s held numerous other governance roles, including Destination Queenstown chair from 1999, the Biosecurity Ministerial Committee, the Hotel Association of NZ, nine years on the NZ Tourism Board, and 10 years on the Skyline board, chair for two, overseeing major international expansions.

She was NZ Hotelier of the Year at Holiday Inn and SkyCity won the Supreme Tourism Award under her watch.

Jan’s secret’s always been “surround yourself with good people and ensure you’ve got a good engineer and a good chef. I couldn’t do either of those myself,” she laughs.