Sydney conference

I've been lucky enough to be able to do a bit of travel this year and that continued last week when I went down to a three day conference in Sydney.

The conference was being held at the Masonic Centre which is at the south end of the CBD and since I was with a couple of friends the best option was a 2 bedroom apartment at Meriton Kent Street. I've stayed at the hotel previously so I knew what to expect and since we were there for a couple of days I upgraded to a sky view apartment (higher floors). The weather was terrible on the first day but thankfully it cleared up over the next few days so we could actually admire the view (see pictures below).

Thankfully we booked a couple of weeks early as two bedroom apartments sell out virtually every weekend in Sydney. That didn't stop us having to pay top dollar for the apartment on Saturday night ... which hurts as I'm obviously used to being "looked after" by hotels when I travel!

2008 by the numbers

I hope everyone thoroughly enjoyed the festive season. Susan and I started back on Monday while Adam has another week off and returns on Tuesday the 13th.

One of the first things I do around this time of the year is to work out our hotel room production for the calendar year just gone. This shows where we have booked most of our rooms and also how each city has performed compared to previous years.

Here are the results in order of our sales for each capital city (largest to smallest).

1. Brisbane down 40% (last year down 12%)
2. Perth up 77% (last year up 140%)
3. Melbourne down 40% (last year up 30%)
4. Sydney down 20% (last year up 100%)
5. Darwin up 95% (last year up 150%)
6. Adelaide up 1% (last year up 240%)
7. Canberra down 80% (last year up 90%)

As you can see, we and the hotel industry in general have felt the economic slowdown and the market definitely isn't as strong as it was the year before.

We weren't surprised to see Perth surge up the ladder (4th last year). Darwin's move up did shock as was the realisation that Adelaide hadn't risen more. We thought it had definitely outperformed.

Thanks to the strong performance of Perth, we also had a new # 1 hotel this year, Novotel Langley Perth (Advantages king room pictured below). Our top 5 is normally all Brisbane hotels but the Marriott at # 3 was the only Brisbane hotel this year.

Our top 5 hotels in 2008:

1. Novotel Langley Perth
2. Diplomat Canberra
3. Brisbane Marriott Hotel
4. Mantra Pandanas Darwin
5. Meriton Kent Street Sydney