Source: Radio New Zealand
The Metallica concert next week is one of two events set to boost hotel capacity in Auckland. Metallica
Hotels are expected to reach capacity next week with two major events coming to the city, Auckland Council’s cultural agency says.
Hotels in the city reached 96 percent occupancy in November 2024 with concerts from Pearl Jam and Coldplay, and 90 percent earlier this year in January thanks to the Luke Combs concert and SailGP.
Tātaki Auckland Unlimited said supported major and business events contributed to an $89 million boost in GDP in the last financial year.
Rock band Metallica was set to draw crowds next week, alongside the World Indigenous Peoples’ Conference on Education.
The conference was expected to be the largest academic conference the country had ever held, with roughly 3,800 attendees, while was set to play a sold out crowd at Eden Park.
Tātaki Auckland Unlimited’s Director of Destination Annie Dundas said they were hoping to reach 100 percent occupancy by next Wednesday.
“We are almost at 100 percent occupany,” she said.
“It doesn’t happen often but our plan is, with our major event and business event programme of work, that we want this to happen more often to support our amazing accomodation and hospitality sectors.”
Dundas said a successful summer season was needed for the city’s hotel sector.
She said summer was when hotels and most tourism operators make their money for the whole year.
“We need summers to be good,” Dundas said, “we’ve got a lot of increased capacity in Auckland in terms of accomodation so a lot of great new hotels have opened over the last sort of 12 to 18 months, which was, of course, all planned prior to Covid.”
“We’ve got about 18,000 rooms to fill across the city every night, and so having a really great roster of major events as well as business events really helps to fill that volume into those properties.”
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
