Ride with Pride Is the Transfer Service That'll Take You Around Queenstown's Winter Pride LGBTQIA+ Festival

Friday, August 25 marks the beginning of a huge weekend for Queenstown, and for Aotearoa's queer community, with the annual Winter Pride festival kicking off amongst the snow-capped mountains of the deep south. The week is filled to the brim with a LGBTQIA+ celebrations, including parties, ski days and more, which means attendees will have to find a way to get around — and Booking.com is making sure they're doing it in style.

Ride with Pride is a bookable SUV transfer service, and provides folks at Winter Pride a safe way to pop from mountain to town, and then to mountain again. The service is inspired by Booking.com's research, which found that 85 percent of LGBTQIA+ Kiwi travellers feel they have to think about their safety before choosing a holiday destination, a marked increase from 58 percent in 2022. Seventy percent considered some holiday destinations completely off-limits to the queer community, and 56 percent had cancelled a booked trip after realising that the destination did not support LGBTQIA+ travellers.

Queenstown has been home to the Winter Pride festival for more than 20 years, and the tourism destination prides – no pun intended — itself on carving out a safe and inclusive space for the queer community to celebrate, while being their authentic selves.

Booking.com wanted to embrace this message while keeping the community safe, and so Ride with Pride was born. There are a limited number of seats on the sleek SUV service, with bookings opening on, Monday, August 21.

All proceeds for the bookings will be donated to OutLine Aotearoa, a rainbow mental health organisation which provides a free support phone line for anyone in the queer community, as well as specialist face-to-face and video counselling for the LGBTQIA+ community throughout New Zealand.

You can book your seat on a Ride with Pride SUV by heading to Booking.com. Rides are available to book from Monday, August 21 — and there are limited seats available.