The Tourism Businesses in Australia report includes data on the size of tourism-related businesses, and their main activities and locations across Australia.
Download the report
Summary
Each year, Tourism Research Australia (TRA) publishes a summary of the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ counts of tourism businesses in Australia. The TRA summary categorises tourism businesses by:
- industry sector
- employment size
- organisational structure
- business turnover
- states, territories, and tourism regions.
Key findings
The report reveals there were 358,277 tourism businesses operating nationwide at 30 June 2022. This is 5.7% or 19,233 more businesses than the previous year.
Although the strongest increase since 2017-18, the growth is below the nationwide average growth rate in 2021-22 for all Australian businesses (7.0%). Nonetheless, even with this lower amount, 1 in 7 Australian businesses (14%) is directly connected to tourism.
Most of the growth in tourism business numbers in 2021-22 occurred in three industry sectors:
- retail trade services (up by 7% or 10,422)
- cafes, restaurants, and take-away services. This includes pubs, clubs, taverns, and bars (up by 5% or 4,735)
- cultural, sports and recreation services (up by 10% or 3,390).
Small businesses form most of Australia’s tourism business sector. Of all tourism businesses in June 2022:
- 48% or 172,263 were micro or small, with 1 to 19 employees
- 47% or 169,897 had no employees other than the owner.
There were 11% or 16,416 additional non-employing tourism businesses in 2021-22. This accounted for 85% of the total increase over the previous year.
As at June 2022, 82% of tourism businesses were in New South Wales (117,781), Victoria (111,400) and Queensland (64,038). Although rates of growth varied, all states and territories saw an increase in tourism businesses in 2021-22.
Data tables
Find out more about tourism businesses in our data tables.