Melbourne has added 5,187 hotel rooms across 22 properties, of which eight are upscale, four are upper midscale, seven are upper upscale and three are luxury.
Of the major international hotel operators, Marriott was the busiest, opening six hotels, against TFE’s four, IHG’s three and Accor’s single opening. These debuts boosted the city’s accommodation to the fourth quarter last year by 24 per cent.
Of the new hotels, 70 per cent are within the CBD and the rest are in inner city precincts, such as Docklands and Southbank.
Another eight hotels are due to open in the next two years, while two recently began taking guests – Melbourne Place and Lanson Place add 191 and 137 rooms respectively to Melbourne’s hotel inventory.
The eight under construction will add a further 1,472 rooms, meaning that since 2020 the city will have boosted its room stock by 32 per cent.
The new properties due to open in 2025 include a Holiday Inn and Hotel Indigo in Bourke Street Mall, with a combined 450 rooms, and 1 Hotel Melbourne on the Yarra River opposite the convention centre, with 277 rooms. Later in 2025 three hotels will open: Peppers Hotel Cremorne with 31 rooms, Hyatt House South Melbourne with 97 rooms and TFE’s Hannah Street Hotel Southbank with 188 rooms. And due in Q1 in 2026 is the Shangri-La Melbourne, a 60-storey luxury property of 489 rooms.
Accommodation Australia is tracking the city’s room stock, reporting to its member hotels both upcoming hotel projects and performance figures.
The numbers are also critical to Melbourne Convention Bureau (MCB) and Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre (MCEC) when they’re bidding for events to be staged five years or more in advance.
A chart of the nation’s major city accommodation shows that in December 2019, Melbourne and Sydney were neck and neck with available rooms, but since then Melbourne has surged ahead growing room stock twice as fast, by more than 32 per cent against Sydney’s 16 per cent.
Looking at total rooms available in other cities, Brisbane has 14,157, Perth has 10,925, Adelaide has 5,715, Canberra has 5,796 and Hobart has 2155.
Since 2020 Hobart has grown available rooms by 38 per cent and Adelaide by 34 per cent.
