Holiday Inn Express Sunshine Coast will offer 181 rooms in the Maroochydore CBD.
Holiday Inn Express Sunshine Coast will offer 167 rooms in the Maroochydore CBD.

Property investment and developer Pro-invest will bring the select-service Holiday Inn Express brand to the booming Sunshine Coast hub of Maroochydore in Queensland as the region continues its arc of reinvention and growth.

Set to open in 2020 as a cornerstone development in the Maroochydore Town Centre precinct, the company has lodged a development application with Economic Development Queensland for a 167-room hotel. At nine storeys in height, the property will offer guests an outdoor swimming pool, restaurant and bar and conference facilities above a ground floor retail area.

Holiday Inn Express and Suites Sunshine Coast will be the brand’s tenth owned by Pro-invest, with six in the pipeline adding to the four already open in Sydney at Macquarie Park, Newcastle, Adelaide and Brisbane Central, which opened in 2017.

The new hotel signing marks the first international hotel brand to open a newly-built site on the Sunshine Coast since Novotel arrived in the late 1980s.

An artist’s rendering of the transformed Maroochydore CBD precinct.

InterContinental Hotels Group Senior Director Development – Australasia, Abhijay Sandilya, congratulated Pro-invest on its latest site acquisition and for its success developing the brand in Australia.

“IHG and Proinvest have a great relationship, and it’s fantastic to see how they are bringing a world-leading evolution of this select service brand to the market.”

According to recent data from Tourism Research Australia, the Sunshine Coast continues to break records for visitor numbers, with a 15 per cent jump to 3.9 million total visitors for the year ending March 2019. The region’s Overnight Visitor Expenditure closed at $2.5 billion for the same period.

Pro-invest CEO, Ronald Barrott, said Holiday Inn Express Sunshine Coast would be one of the region’s most significant tourism infrastructure projects in decades.

“While there have been some hotel developments proposed for the Sunshine Coast in recent years, they are still a long way from being realised. In contrast, Pro-invest has the unique advantage in the Australian hotel landscape of being able to deliver projects from inception to opening.

“The Sunshine Coast is transitioning from a largely leisure-based market to a more diversified market with major growth in businesses establishing themselves in the region to take advantage of large-scale infrastructure projects such as the expanded airport, the Maroochydore city centre and the underwater submarine cable, which will help establish the region as hi-tech hub in Queensland,” Barrott added.