We want to visit Australia and New Zealand -and keep the trip to about 14 days! Impossible, right? However, if we use a private tour operator, and prioritize highlights (Roratura, the Great Barrier Reef and at least one major city in Australia), does anyone have a good starting point itinerary AND recommendation for a tour operator that will handle all transfers? We do not want to drive ourselves. Some in our small group will want a few physical adventures, the others are more into scenery and cultural activites.

Having a private tour guide will not shrink either of these two countries.

You have made a statement and morphed it into a question. The statement is correct. 14 days is not enough time to do justice to two countries.

Suggest you research Australia and New Zealand to see which one more closely fits your interests, available time and weather preferences, with whenever you are planning this trip.

Then choose one & come back with more detail and a rough Itinerary if you would like some help to finesse it.

I agree that you would be better off sticking to one country. If you take away the travel days, you're not left with that much. Say, half the time in each country?

You could fly into Sydney and connect through to Cairns to visit the reef. Or fly direct to Cairns if you can. Try to avoid the wet season in the north, roughly Nov to Apr. There is more chance then that the boats may not go out to the reef, due to poor weather. Cairns and that area is either hot and dry or hot and wet.

Then fly back to Sydney for a few days, then on to NZ. As you can see, it wouldn't be a tour, it's a few days in two places. You'd just need flights and accommodation and then book a few day trips.

you could do 2 cities in australia, and some of the south island in NZ. Fly into Cairns, then fly to Sydney. From Sydney fly to Queenstown and from NZ fly home.
It is doable, but rushed.

We did a 6 week driving tour of New Zealand (both north and south islands) and still didn’t see everything. Been to Australia 3 times for a total of 14 days and barely scratched the surface. Both and large countries with everything very stretched out. With just 14 days you’d be wise to limit yourself to just one country.

Australia is roughly the same size as your lower 48 states.

If I wanted to see the USA in 7 days, what would you recommend. Why?

Much the same here. You'll lose a couple of days with travel to and from. Another day lost between Australia and New Zealand.

New Zealand is a separate country, nowhere near the size of Australia, but it still takes time to get around.

Too hard!

It is not very feasible to visit both Australia and New Zealand in ~14 days; you need at least 3 weeks, especially if you prioritize well and use private or semi-private logistics the whole way. It won’t allow for seeing everything, but with a focused itinerary and a good tour operator, you’ll have a very rewarding trip. Some recommendations—including NZ Tourism Tours www.nz-tourism.com —for operators, travel agencies who seem able to cover what you want.

This map of Australia may give you some context to our comments about your ability to see much of it in your timeframe.
In addition to being large, we fortunately have a relatively small population (about 26m at last count, I think), and that means towns & cities are more spread out than in, say, Europe.
Australia – size map: https://www.virtualoceania.net/austr...ustralia.shtml