Hotel & HospitalityChris ThomsonSun 10 May 26
Intercontinental Resort Greenlit for SA’s Barossa Wine Region
Adelaide-based Strategic Alliance and Commercial’s planned five-star Intercontinental hotel and winery has been approved for the Barossa Valley an hour’s drive north-east of the South Australian capital.
The $110-million Intercontinental Barossa Resort & Spa on Hoffnungsthal Road, Williamstown is forecast to create between $70 million and $100 million in annual economic benefits for the Barossa.
The 5000sq m project, designed by the Baukultur and JBG architectural firms, is slated to deliver up to 150 hotel rooms with views of the nation’s best-known wine region. A restaurant and premium function rooms are also planned.
The SA Government had declared the proposal a major project and classified it as an impact-assessed development—the most stringent level of assessment within the state’s planning system.
SA housing, urban development and planning minister Nick Champion said issues raised in the project’s public consultation phase—including landscape and character, traffic and congestion and bushfire risk—were carefully examined and addressed.
“This development is a vote of confidence in South Australia and the economic benefits will flow through the Barossa for generations to come,” he said.
Strategic Alliance and Commercial acquired the site for $1.35 million in December 2024.
The planning report for the development said the only other hotel of scale in the Barossa was the 140-key Novotel Barossa Valley. There are 31 smaller luxury hotels across the region.
There is also an Intercontinental hotel in central Adelaide, 43km south-west of the planned Barossa hotel.
Across metropolitan Adelaide, 15 hotels are being developed—11 in the CBD including the 35-storey Treehouse Hotel in ICD Property's Market Square project scheduled for completion at the end of this year.
In outer Adelaide, four hotel projects are under way including the five-storey Panaroma Hotel on Goodwood Road, which is nearing completion. Two hotels opened last year; the seven-storey George Hotel at Glenelg and the Urban Rest hotel at Hackney.
Last week, Hilton Australasia revealed plans to develop a 27-storey hotel in central Adelaide’s East End under a franchise agreement with Auriga Investments and to be operated by Trilogy Hotels. The project is set to reconnect Hilton with South Australia after last year’s sale of the company’s 40-year-old hotel on the city’s main street to Thai group Amora Hotels & Resorts broke the nexus.
