Auckland hotels near full as Metallica and global education summit arrive

Hotels are expected to reach capacity next week with Metallica and the World Indigenous Peoples' Conference on in Auckland. Photo / Getty Images

By RNZ

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% occupancy in November 2024 with concerts from Pearl Jam and Coldplay, and 90% 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 were set to draw crowds next week, alongside the World Indigenous Peoples’ Conference on Education.

The conference is expected to be the largest academic conference the country has ever held, with roughly 3800 attendees, while Metallica were set to play a sold-out crowd at Eden Park.

Tātaki Auckland Unlimited’s director of destination Annie Dundas said it was hoping to reach 100% occupancy by next Wednesday.

“We are almost at 100% occupancy,” 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 accommodation 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 accommodation 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.”

– RNZ