New $45 million hotel for Queenstown

Auckland developer Safari Group wants to build a 120-room hotel on the prominent site at the entrance to Queenstown. Photo / Mike Scott

A $45 million hotel is planned for the entrance to central Queenstown.

Auckland developer Safari Group has confirmed it wants to build a 100 to 120-room hotel on the prominent Frankton Rd-Stanley St corner site.

Safari bought the 2188sq m plot - which has been vacant for 10 years - last Friday, for an undisclosed sum, understood to be about $6m. It will be the second large hotel to be built in that part of Queenstown.

Five weeks ago, Australian developer Pro-invest Group announced it would build a $60m, 227-room hotel on the nearby corner of Stanley, Sydney and Melbourne Sts.

Safari Group owner Robert Neil is already working with an architect, whom he would not name, on a hotel design.

''It's got lake views, it's CBD, it's a marquee site coming into town,'' he said.

''At the end of the day, it's a bit of land with some buses parked on it, so what goes there needs to say, 'hey, you've now arrived in Queenstown', and that's what we're working around.''

A hotel-room shortage is pushing up Queenstown prices. Hotel room occupancy for the year to March was 90 per cent, at an average rate of $240 - a 15 per cent jump over the same period last year, Colliers International figures, released on Tuesday, show.

It was hoped that would ease with a solid pipeline of hotel, apartment and backpacker rooms planned.

In the past 12 months, developments totalling about 800 rooms have been reported.

Safari Group, which has developed more than a dozen hotel-based properties around New Zealand, is already active in Queenstown.

Last winter, it opened the 59-room Ramada hotel at Frankton's Remarkables Park.

It was the resort's first new hotel in five years and the first to be built near the airport.

Safari is now developing Wyndham Garden next door, comprising 75 hotel rooms and 55 residential apartments.

Its latest purchase presents challenges - including a wellingtonia tree planted in about 1891 and council demands for off-street car parking and a coach drop-off area.

Mr Neil hoped to start work on the hotel in April or May next year.