Regional Tourism Satellite Account 2020-21

About the data

The Regional Tourism Satellite Account provides annual data for Australia’s tourism regions. This data includes:

• tourism gross value added (GVA) – direct, indirect, and total
  
• tourism gross regional product (GRP) – direct, indirect, and total
• tourism employment by full-time or part-time
• tourism consumption by visitor type (international or domestic)
• population
• number of tourism businesses.

This data allows for comparison between:

• individual regions
  
• the tourism industry and other industries in the economy.

Adverse economic and social conditions followed the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-21. This saw uneven impacts on tourism across Australia’s regions. Among the most impacted were:

• capital city and regional Australia regions such as Tropical North Queensland and Lasseter. These have a higher reliance on international and/or domestic interstate visitors
  
• Victorian tourism regions which endured many COVID-19 lockdowns through the year.

However, there were tourism regions with improved results for 2020-21 compared to 2019-20. These included regions:

• typically dominated by domestic travel that benefited from increased intrastate travel with state borders closed for long periods in 2020-21
  
• impacted in New South Wales by the onset of COVID-19 but also severe bushfires in 2019-20.

State and territory data tables

Explore state and territory data.

Choose a state or territory from the tabs and choose a tourism region. You can view:

• regional summary – a time series of the data from 2006–07 to 2020–21
  
• consumption by tourism product
• gross value added – the economic value of goods and services produced
• employment by industry
• state summary – direct, indirect, and total results.

The main categories for industries in tourism are tourism characteristic and tourism connected.

Download regional data tables

Impact of COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic continued to impact tourism in 2020-21. International borders remained closed restricting entry of foreign tourists. The closing of many state borders throughout the year also restricted interstate travel.

Notes on the data

Results for smaller tourism regions with a visitor sample of 500 or less are less reliable. Results vary greatly from year to year. For this reason, estimates of GVA, GRP and employment for smaller regions are ‘smoothed’ by taking an average over 3 years.

However, we did not smooth results for those regions in 2019-20 and 2020-21. This is because smoothing would hide the substantial impact of COVID-19 on Australia’s regional economies.

Revisions to time series data

This release includes:

• very limited data on international visitor expenditure for 2020-21 financial year. This is due to international border closures
• new domestic data for the 2020-21 financial year
• revised time series data for financial years 2006-07 to 2020-21.

The revised time series replaces all previous versions. It also considers key revisions in the source data including changes to:

• ABS National Accounts data. This occurs yearly and directly affects GVA for each region, as well as employment
• TRA’s regional expenditure data, which affects tourism’s economic value and share of regional economies
• total employment and population in the regions as new information becomes publicly available. We update data at a minimum of every 5 years at Census.

Explore summary data

You can explore summary data by:

• choosing a state and a tourism region using the drop-down menus
  
• viewing the data for 2020–21 and the change from 2019–20 in the table
• hovering over the chart elements to show total result.