Tourism businesses in Australia: June 2017 to 2022

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.

Contact us

Email tourism.research@tra.gov.au