New figures for hotel occupancy from across the Liverpool City Region show that they are continuing to improve.

Last year Liverpool city centre saw an increase of 1%, to 77% from 2014.

The 2015 average weekend occupancy stood at 88%, a slight increase on 2014.

The average week day occupancy saw an increase of 2% to 75% since 2014.

Across the city region room occupancy also increased by 1% since 2014 to 76%.

Average weekend occupancy stood at 85%, while weekday occupancy rose by 3% to 76%.

The average hotel revenue per available room (RevPAR) in the city centre was £53.87, an increase of approximately £3 since 2014, with the weekend average at £78.62, an increase of approximately £4 since 2014.

These figures are helped with the opening of seven new hotels in the city centre throughout 2015, and some major conferences coming to the city last year, including the Liberal Democrat Conference, Unison and the British Medical Association.

Visitor figures are expected to rise even further following the opening of the £66m Exhibition Centre, adjacent to the ECHO Arena and BT Conference Centre, last September, increasing the city’s capacity for hosting major industry events.

These are just some of the latest figures to come out of the latest edition of the Tourism Data Summary, produced by North West Research – the research team at the Liverpool City Region Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) who collate a wide range of key tourism statistics.

Other key facts include: There were 58.7m visitors to the Liverpool City Region in 2014; the visitor economy was worth £3.8bn to the region, with 49,000 jobs supported; and Liverpool is placed sixth of all UK towns or cities visited by overseas visitors and seventh for domestic visitors, throughout 2015.

Anna Rees, North West research manager, said: “These statistics show some encouraging figures, and we believe the busy conference industry is helping to drive up the mid-week occupancy.

“While we are clearly still going through a period of growth with the number of visitors coming to the city, we are confident that figures across the hotel and hospitality industry in the city region will continue to rise.”