SWANSEA: The council’s own study says the city needs more hotels. The one it promised beside the arena is still grass

Swansea needs more hotel rooms. That is the conclusion of a refreshed Swansea Council study going in front of councillors next week, and it is the same conclusion the council reached in 2024 when it first went looking for someone to build a hotel between Swansea Arena and the LC.

The hotel has not been built. The site, part of the council’s Copr Bay development and described by the council itself two years ago as temporarily landscaped while it waited for the developer, is still waiting.

What the hotel demand study says

The updated hotel demand study, summarised in papers for Tuesday’s Service Improvement, Regeneration and Finance scrutiny panel, says Swansea’s visitor economy “continues to grow in value, with increasing demand for overnight stays and consistently strong hotel occupancy levels”.

In plain terms, the city’s hotels are full often enough that the consultants think it could fill more. The study “identifies a continuing need for additional hotel accommodation over the coming years”, and the council says the evidence “will help inform future discussions with investors, developers and funding partners”.

The arena hotel that was due to start in 2025

That is close to word for word what the council said in March 2024, when it announced an expert study had found Swansea needed three new hotels and invited operators to build one of at least 120 rooms on the land beside the arena.

By August that year it had picked a preferred developer and operator, approved the sale of the land, and described a 150-bedroom hotel with a rooftop bar looking over the bay and room for about 40,000 guests a year. Construction, “subject to final agreements and planning consent”, was expected to start in 2025.

“We know from an expert-led recent study commissioned by our tourism team that there’s a need for more high-quality, modern hotel rooms in Swansea by 2026,” council leader Rob Stewart said at the time. 2026 is here. The council’s own project page, last updated in July 2025, still says it is “in discussions with a preferred developer and operator” and that the brand “will be announced once these discussions are complete”.

The late Cllr Robert Francis-Davies, then cabinet member for investment, regeneration and tourism, said visitors had spent £609m in Swansea, Mumbles and Gower in 2023 and that “other city sites that could accommodate additional hotels are also being looked at”. Two years on, the arena site is the only one the council has ever named.

Tuesday’s papers do not mention the arena site at all. The corporate plan step to “develop and promote more city living, including new hotels, retail, office space and food and beverage facilities” is rated green, on the strength of Welsh Government Transforming Towns grants and a council loan scheme for private developers.

Who is building hotels in the meantime

The private sector has not waited. In April the council approved plans to more than double the Grand Hotel opposite the railway station, from 53 bedrooms to 106, with a rooftop bar of its own.

Premier Inn’s owner Whitbread has put Mumbles on its list of places it wants a new hotel. At the same time it is selling its Llanelli Premier Inn together with the closed Sandpiper in what it calls a “whole site exit” from the town.

And the 121-bedroom Delta Hotels by Marriott on the marina, a fixture since 1989, was put up for sale in February, with the agent telling buyers that development across the city had increased demand for good hotel rooms. The Civic Centre redevelopment next door has the potential for a hotel too, the council has said.

Why the arena matters to the numbers

The council’s own case for the hotel in 2024 was that the arena was bringing people into the city and Swansea was short of beds to keep them overnight. The arena passed one million visitors in March, and the council said in 2024 that Swansea had been in the UK’s top five for revenue per available room between 2019 and 2022.

The new study sits alongside a visitor survey of 1,005 people, which the council says found a “significant proportion of overnight stays”, and a trade survey of 120 tourism businesses, most of which reported stable or rising customer numbers. Recruitment, rising costs and seasonality were their main worries.

The report, signed off by cabinet member for development Cllr Andrew Williams, is going to scrutiny to shape the next Destination Management Plan, the council’s tourism strategy for 2027 to 2031. The current plan runs out at the end of this year.

The panel meets at 10am on Tuesday 6 October. Whether anyone asks about the hotel is up to the councillors on it.