However, it was too early to say how last Friday's magnitude-9 earthquake and tsunami will affect the Japanese market.
General managers from all 19 Queenstown members of the hotel council attended the monthly meeting in the Crowne Plaza last week to discuss the commercially confidential national monthly statistics for last month.
"I think we had a fairly positive month," the council's Queenstown chairwoman, Penny Clark, also general manager of Goldridge Resort, said this week.
"We were behind in January, we picked it up in February, so we're back to square one. So I was quite pleased with February, considering that last week we had the impact of the earthquake."
Ms Clark said the occupancy level of hotel council members was nearly 4% up on the previous February, mainly due to conference and incentive bookings.
"That business boosted up the normal tour and FIT [free and independent traveller] sort of business.
"We needed some positivity in February because March is not going to be particularly brilliant, [given] the delay factor of the [Christchurch] earthquake and we're not going to see any Japanese customers around for a while."
Queenstown was recognised as the "Best Incentive Destination" at the micenet Australia conference and incentive industry awards, in Melbourne, last month.
Destination Queenstown chief executive Tony Everitt said yesterday the C&I market had been building in the Wakatipu over the past 12 months and February's increased hotel occupancy was part of the trend.
The resort's landscape, activities, climate, night life, compact nature and increasing accessibility were its drawcards, he said.
"Queenstown is seen as an aspirational brand and part of the objective for business-related travel is to reward staff, suppliers and clients. It helps to motivate them."
Ms Clark and Mr Everitt both said the Japanese market had been "soft" for a couple of years, but was expected to pick up in 2011, before the earthquake and tsunami.
The day before the Japanese quake, Mr Everitt said Air New Zealand intended to return Boeing 747 jumbo jets to its Tokyo routes from next summer for the first time in five years.
The extra seats would have created opportunities for growth, he said. Japanese tours to the South Island in March were cancelled out of respect, as bodies were still being recovered in Christchurch.
Tours were not cancelled out of fear of more earthquakes, as the Japanese were relatively used to them.
"It's too early to gauge the impact of the earthquake on tourism flows," Mr Everitt said.
"There are precedents. The Kobe earthquake in 1995 had a short-term impact, but 12 to 18 months later was back on track, although this is possibly a more significant event than Kobe."
The Land of the Rising Sun accounted for 4% of tourism in the Land of the Long White Cloud, but the value was up an extra 2% to 3%, because Japanese tourists tended to be big spenders.
Data did not exist on a town level, but the Japanese market was considered to account for at least 4% of Queenstown's tourist trade, as the resort especially appealed to them, Mr Everitt said.
When asked what the general mood was among hotel managers for the months ahead, Ms Clark said they were feeling "wary, just being careful, with staff, with everything.
"The tough times of the last couple of years are not behind us yet."
