Business tourist visitor days

IBISWorld expects the number of business tourist visitor days to decrease by 0.5% during 2025-26, to total 16.78 million days. Domestic business travel is expected to expand slightly, supported by improvements to overall business confidence. However, this growth is set to be offset by a sharp decline in international business tourism. Through the first six months of 2025-26, international business tourism has declined by 16.1% compared to the same period in 2024-25. However, given that international business tourists are only expected to account for 11.0% of total business visitor days in 2025-26, the overall impact will be less pronounced.

Before the pandemic, underlying growth in business travel had stagnated, with a compounded annual growth rate of 0.2% between 2011-12 and 2019-20, as technological adoption increased, reducing some of the need for business travel. These trends were accelerated by the onset of the pandemic in 2020-21, which significantly limited travel, particularly from international business tourists. Domestic business travel was less impacted, limiting the impact on total business tourist visitor days. As business conditions gradually returned to relative normality throughout 2021-22 and 2022-23, combined with the reopening of international borders, total business tourist visitor days recovered.

The effects of the pandemic have subsided, but its impact on working conditions continues to be a significant influence on corporate travel trends. The usage of remote videoconferencing platforms has remained almost universal, constraining businesses from returning to face-to-face meetings. As a result, the number of total business tourist visitor days in 2025-26 is expected to remain well below the recorded pre-pandemic peaks of business travel.

Over three-quarters of business tourist visitor days can be attributed to local residents, with business confidence and the number of businesses being two key drivers of domestic corporate travel. While the number of businesses has grown steadily over recent years, fluctuations in business confidence have caused additional volatility in the number of business tourist visitor days undertaken by domestic residents. Overall, IBISWorld forecasts the number of business tourist visitor days to grow at an annualised 2.6% over the five years through 2025-26.