Rockhampton Leichhardt Hotel closure: Travel Associates opens new store up the road

The travel agency was forced to find a new shop after the Rockhampton CBD hotel announced it was demolishing the building. Here’s the latest.

After the closure of Rockhampton’s Leichhardt Hotel in March and announcement it would be demolished, Travel Associates had to find a new home.

The business has now officially moved into its new space – just a few blocks straight up the road at 89 Denham Street.

The building would be mostly known to locals as the former Cupcake Manor shop with the large cupcake sticker on the side of the wall on the Campbell Street side.

The property sold in June this year for $363,000.

Cupcake Manor was open from 2015 to 2017 and before that, there was a gym, Bee Fit, and McKeagues Surveying Consultants were there around the 2000s.

A tattoo studio, Hello Stranger, opened in the space last year before moving to the northside.

Rockhampton Travel Associates manager Sheron Konig said it was a great new office.

“We’ve got ample room for our Journey room upstairs so when we are having supplier presentations, we can use it for those information nights,” she said.

“We all have our nice new desks, it makes it a bit more personalised for everybody as before we had the long desk.”

After only being open a week in the new location, they have been kept busy.

“Interestingly, the enquiry has been coming through as walks in,” Ms Konig said.

“It’s become a destination agency.”

A travel agency had been at the Leichhardt building for decades, posited well in the Denham and Bolsover street corner shop.

“It had been in history books basically that Duthies had a travel agency there, there has been one in different name form for 30 plus years … People know the travel agency in the Duthie building or the Leichhardt Hotel,” she said.

“It’s been our home for a long time but now we have nice new home, it’s very prominent on the corner, we’ve got more signage coming.”

After what has been a tumultuous couple of years in the tourism industry, Ms Konig was excited to talk about travel coming back into full swing.

Ms Konig is a “cruising specialist” and said there were new ships coming into Australian waters and cruises would start up in October and November.

“If you’re not sure what sort of cruise you want to go on, come talk to me,” she said.

“Whether it’s a family cruise, multigenerational cruise or just a relaxing cruise where you get away from everybody, or Europe, or just anything at all.”

The Leichhardt Hotel is owned by Australian Venue Co (AVC) of which Coles is involved.

The property was built in the 70s by JM Kelly and has seven floors with 60 four-star hotel rooms and function facilities.

The hotel closed on Easter Monday (April 18 2022), after Rockynats finished.

The 21 staff members of the hotel were offered relocations to the Club Hotel in Gladstone or redundancies.

At the time, AVC told this publication it would start to demolish the building however the building has only been boarded up and no construction work has actually begun.

It is understood there had been major problems with thieves and squatters as the power and water was still connected.

Australian Venue Co told this publication this month it had no updates to share on the property.