Tourism focus and strategy needed to fill hotel rooms

If they build them, they will come.

That is the plan for the billions of dollars worth of hotel rooms expected to be built in and around Perth over the next three years.

In 2011, the State Government set a target of 1900 new rooms by 2020 to cope with demand and avoid WA missing out on hundreds of millions of dollars in tourism revenue.

Double Tree Hilton Perth Waterfront Hotel will have panoramic river views.

This was seen to be difficult task, given that only 223 extra hotel rooms were created between 2006 and 2012. At the time, Perth had the highest room rates and lowest room occupancy in the country.

After offering some incentives and pressing ahead with projects such as Elizabeth Quay, the Government is now certain to exceed the target and hit at least 3000 by 2020.

The list of hotels in the pipeline we published yesterday was expansive and impressive.

To name just a few, it included the 522-room Crown Towers, the 204-room Ritz-Carlton planned for Elizabeth Quay, the 200-room Ibis Styles Hotel on Adelaide Terrace the 362-room Westin Perth proposed for the old fire station in Hay Street.

The challenge now is to ensure the rooms are filled.

The slowdown in the mining industry has led to higher vacancies and lower room rates, attracting more tourists but threatening hotels’ bottom lines.

Indeed, some of the borderline projects currently on the books may be delayed or shelved as a result.

The Government believes projects such as Elizabeth Quay and Perth City Link will help.

There are also hopes that seats in the new football stadium will be set aside for interstate visitors and that more can be done to ensure these visitors stay in WA for a few extra days. But the Australian Hotels Association is concerned that more needs to be done, and more money spent, to attract interstate visitors.

Statistics we report today indicate the trend is going in the right direction, although the direct benefit to the hotel industry has not been quantified.

The latest visitor survey showed an influx of almost a million extra visitors to WA in the past year.

The number of domestic tourists was up almost 15 per cent, injecting $4.57 billion into the local economy.

Almost 7.9 million domestic tourists, from within WA and interstate, visited in the year to March, compared with 6.9 million the previous year.

Overseas tourism also grew, driven by visitors from Europe and the USA.

Having encouraged so much hotel development in Perth, the Government needs to focus on ensuring that as much as possible is done to fill the rooms and the knock-on employment and economic benefits flow.

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Source: The West Australian, July 8th 2015