New 96-room Mercure Auckland hotel planned by Paris-HQ business

How one of the new rooms on Queen St could look when finished.

Paris-headquartered AccorHotels has just announced a new development in an existing building in Auckland's heart, following a string of other big new hotel announcements in the last few days.

Simon McGrath, the AccorHotels chief operating officer for the Pacific, said: "Mercure Auckland Queen Street is a 96-room hotel spanning eight stories. The hotel will also feature a restaurant, conference room and fitness centre and will be located in the heart of Auckland's CDB. The hotel is being created within an existing building, retrofitted as a hotel. AccorHotels is delighted to work with owners, BN Land Ltd."

An Accor spokesperson said this morning the property was at 500 Queen St, near the intersection with City Rd, towards the Karangahape Rd end of the city's golden mile.

A 207-room Grand Mercure Auckland is at 8 Customs Street East near the foot of Queen St and the historic former Central Post Office building.

Plans for the new hotel interior, showing a restaurant area.

The new deal comes after a string of others in the last few days.

At 51 Albert St near the Wyndham St intersection, a new high-rise Indigo Hotel will rise and illustrations show it will be more than 30 levels high.

At 13 Albert St and on Wolfe St, a new mixed-use building is planned by Singaporean investors. Peter Wall said that might include a hotel.

On the site of the old Datacom House at the Nelson St/Wellesley St intersection, a new Sudima is planned.

Janice Tay, investment manager for NZ Trade & Enterprise, welcomed the new deals.

She runs the Government's Hotel Attraction Project (formally Project Palace), "an initiative focused on encouraging development of hotels given the strong growth we've seen in international visitors, particularly off the back of exponential growth in air capacity and new direct airline routes. Our aim is to create focus in this area in order to provide sufficient rooms for our visitors to support our country's largest export sector in tourism.

"Our original research in 2016 has estimated a demand of 9700 new hotel rooms by 2025 and within the pipeline available, a shortfall of up to 4526 rooms was discovered. The results from this inaugural report have been updated to give a current view on the demand and supply imbalance looking out to 2025," she said.

"The findings of this updated report show a supply response beginning to emerge and the new shortfall is now at 2605 rooms across our seven key regions," she said.

Dean Humphries of Colliers International has also welcomed the hotels, saying they have been needed for some years.