1. HYATT Regency Sydney is positioning itself as the city’s leading events hotel after its official launch early March 2017.

2. INTERCONTINENTAL Hotels Group (IHG) will open a 305- room hotel in the south of Sydney’s CBD, draped in a striking “green veil” of vertical gardens.

3. London’s iconic black cabs have been wrapped in Australian images to encourage more British visitors to “swap the cold for the Gold” and head to the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games in 2018.

4. Neil Perry’s Rosetta is coming to Sydney

5. Accor Hotels’ Pullman brand has been selected for a new 5-star hotel to be developed adjacent to Auckland Airport’s international terminal.

6. New statistics show Asian markets continue to drive Australia’s international visitor arrivals, with Asian nations delivering almost 50 per cent of total arrivals over the past 12 months.

7. Vivid Sydney will return in 2017 with a full line-up of musical acts at the Opera House and a new display at Barangaroo for the annual light festival.

8. Australia’s accommodation and tourism sectors are set to be transformed with a record level of hotel investment of more than $8 billion currently in the pipeline across the country.

9. The Whitsundays has reported its highest ever number of international arrivals over a 12-month period, with 248,000 people visiting the North Queensland destination in 2016.

10. Australia’s travel industry is feeling less optimistic than the rest of the world about business travel in the year ahead, according to a new study by AirPlus International.

11. International business leaders from Wikipedia, Huffington Post and Harvard Business School are among the line-up of speakers at the World Business Forum taking place in Sydney this May.

12. Tourism company Out of the Ordinary Outback will build a new $750,000 hotel and conference facility in the outback New South Wales town of Cobar, following a tourism infrastructure grant from the Federal and NSW Governments.