In 2011 Brisbane’s hotels were creeping towards capacity and had, on average, an occupancy rate of 80.2 per cent for the year.

In response to this Brisbane City Council announced an infrastructure charges incentives to encourage developers of four and five stars hotel to build in Brisbane.

While the supply of hotel rooms has increased on average by about 27 percent between 2011 and 2017, the average occupancy rate has dropped by 6.6 per cent and the average daily rate decreased by $24.10 in the same period.

A Fairfax Media analysis of Brisbane’s hotel openings revealed at least 4033 new rooms became available since 2014 with Next Hotel on the Queen Street Mall and Ibis on Elizabeth Street in Brisbane City both offering more than 300 rooms each.

A further seven hotels will open in 2018 across Brisbane City, Fortitude Valley and South Bank.

The Queen’s Wharf project has proposed about 1600 hotel rooms across five hotels to open by 2022.

Queensland Tourism Industry Council chief executive Daniel Gschwind it was very difficult to smoothly match supply and demand.

“Inevitably you will have fluctuations and that is a challenge for existing hotel operators without a doubt,” he said.

“Ultimately we want to take our share of the growing global market and to achieve that we need more hotels and we will need new brands to bring their own customer base with them.

“So international brands that we’re now seeing coming to Brisbane will open up a new distribution system because loyalty to a brand is a very strong phenomenon and we will have more access to those customers as a destination.”

Mr Gschwind said the hotel business was tough and between the analysis period of 2011 and 2017 there had also been significant competition from Airbnb and Stayz.

“They are a far more prominent player now in short-term accommodation and for better or worse they have had an impact on the supply of commercially available accommodation,” he said.

Brisbane lord mayor Graham Quirk said Brisbane now had enough major hotels to support the city’s tourism industry for the first time in a decade.

“Although not all hotels that have been built were eligible for the infrastructure incentive, the Hotel Investment Strategy has delivered significant investment for the city,” he said

“In 2013, research showed that Brisbane was experiencing a shortage in internationally-recognised, full-service hotel room supply, and was forgoing 121,000 visitors each year.

“This shortage was resulting in Brisbane turning away 278,000 room nights every year – for conference, business and leisure travellers.”

There were 11 hotels which received the incentive to date, totalling $3.1 million in infrastructure charge reductions.

Infrastructure charges are part of the development application process and apply to developments that will generate extra demand in areas such as transport, storm water and community use, such as parks.

In the 2016-17 financial year, the council collected more than $192 million in infrastructure charges.

Cr Quirk said the hotel shortage had stopped the city hosting major conventions, but since the additional supply of accommodation, the city was attracting more events than ever before.

“The numbers of domestic and international visitors to Brisbane continues to reach new record highs and in 2017, a total of 7.8 million tourists came to Brisbane,” he said.

Four- and five-star hotels approved between July 1, 2011, and June 30, 2015, are eligible for the incentive.