New Holiday Inn planned for Queenstown as tourists flock to region

The Holiday Inn Queenstown Remarkables Park will have 182 rooms. Image / Supplied

The Queenstown hotel building boom continues with IHG set to open a new Holiday Inn in Queenstown Remarkables Park to meet strong tourist demand.

The 182-room hotel is set to open n early 2021. Holiday Inn Queenstown Remarkables Park will be a flagship for the hotel brand in New Zealand, it says.

The hotel will be within minutes' drive of Queenstown Airport and close to The Remarkables Ski Field.

Abhijay Sandilya, IHG's senior director of development – Australasia, said Holiday Inn had a focus on expanding into regional areas.

Director of QLong Investments Yigang Wang said Queenstown attracted more than 3.6 million visitor nights annually with an expanding events calendar that attracts domestic and overseas visitors.

QLong owns hotels and apartments in the United States and China.

Earlier this year, The Otago Daily Times reported council data showing there was a 3000-room pipeline of hotel rooms - either under construction (two hotels, 368 rooms), consented but not yet built (eight, 1016 rooms) or in the consenting process (eight, 1715 rooms).

IHG currently has 47 hotels operating under four brands in Australasia, including: InterContinental, Crowne Plaza, Holiday Inn, voco and Holiday Inn Express, with another 29 in the pipeline, including Hotel Indigo — which is planned for Auckland — and EVEN Hotels.

The tourism boom in the Queenstown area has led to plans develop Wanaka Airport to handle flights to other New Zealand centres could be a reality by 2025.

The Queenstown Airport Corporation says a "significant percentage'' of passenger movements at Queenstown Airport "directly relate'' to people coming from or going to Wanaka and it expects demand will increase.

"With this in mind, we are planning to develop a regional airport at Wanaka that will support scheduled domestic services using turbo-prop (Q300 and ATR) and narrow-body jet (A320/21 and B737) aircraft,'' it says.

The airport said services could begin with "about a handful'' of flights from 2025.