Applications open for event planners to connect in Cairns
With Business Events Cairns and Great Barrier Reef announcing last week that it is bringing back educational visits for event planners, the bureau has wasted little time in opening applications for the first familiarisation opportunity, taking place this November.
Running from November 10 to 12, Connect in Cairns will include a one-day trade show for event planners to talk business with 28 local products and suppliers alongside an experiential day to sample the business events offering in the region firsthand.
The bureau has not run an in-destination program like this since 2021.
Australian event planners considering bringing groups to Cairns can apply to attend here, with applications closing on September 26.
New event space opens at Crowne Plaza Hobart
Crowne Plaza Hobart has debuted Centurion Sky, a glass-ceilinged event space with panoramic views of Tasmania’s capital.
Featuring plenty of bifold doors to bring the outside in, the space can accommodate groups of up to 150 standing.
“Centurion Sky, with its unrivalled views of Mount Wellington/Kunanyi is the all-weather space that Hobart has been craving,” said Crowne Plaza Hobart’s general manager, Scott Schaefer.
“I cannot think of a more perfect venue to showcase the very best of Tasmanian hospitality.”
The space joins seven other meeting options at the 241-room hotel.
Possible asbestos issue for NZICC
Fire doors installed within the soon-to-open New Zealand International Convention Centre (NZICC) in Auckland may be contaminated with asbestos.
Pacific Door Systems, the company which supplied fire doors to Fletcher, the building contractor for the NZICC, flagged contamination within some of its stock this week.
The contamination relates to a “core” within the fire doors it manufactures, with the cores coming from an international manufacturer.
While Pacific Door Systems said “only a small percentage” of its stock had been found to contain asbestos when tested, the contamination goes back at least a year, with a single door from about a year ago found be contaminated with asbestos.
In a note to the New Zealand stock market today, Fletcher Building said fire doors supplied to the NZICC may be contaminated with asbestos and that “they are undertaking investigations to confirm the extent of any issue”.
According to the statement from Fletcher, “surface testing undertaken to date has confirmed no asbestos residue in occupied or public areas, and the current advice is that potentially impacted doors are safe in their current, installed state”.
SkyCity has confirmed to micenet that the NZICC building site is still open, investigations are underway and that the business is working with Fletcher “to understand any impacts” of potential contamination.
Following a difficult and much elongated construction period involving a major fire and the pandemic, the NZICC is scheduled to open in February 2026.
