The urn may have stayed in English hands, but the real winner of this summer’s Ashes campaign was Australia’s hotel industry, which quietly booked itself one of the most lucrative fortnights in recent memory.
From Perth to Sydney, five major markets rode a wave of cricket-fuelled demand, pushing occupancy, average daily rates and revenue per available room to levels that would make even a seasoned hotelier raise an appreciative eyebrow.
Fresh data from CoStar and STR shows the Men’s Ashes Tour delivered not just crowds and column inches, but a decisive commercial innings for Australia’s accommodation sector.
Melbourne led the charge during the fourth Test, where hotel performance peaked on the second night with occupancy reaching a thumping 92.3 per cent, ADR climbing to $342.62, and RevPAR touching $316.39 figures that would normally require a Taylor Swift residency to explain.
And even the Melbourne Test’s unexpectedly brisk conclusion failed to dent demand.
“The unexpected completion of the Melbourne Test within two days didn’t see any major adverse effect to occupancy as the market consistently outperformed the prior year for 28–30 December,” said Matthew Burke, regional director at STR. “The larger seating capacity of Melbourne and Adelaide’s stadium to Sydney, emphasizes the outsized impact it has for market occupancy.”
Sydney saved its strongest performance for the finale. On Sunday, January 4, Harbour City recorded its highest series metrics with occupancy of 79.4 per cent, ADR of $320.70 and RevPAR of $254.58, tidy numbers for what is traditionally the quieter end of the festive season.
But the standout innings belonged to Perth.
During the opening Test on Saturday, November 22, Perth hotels hit an extraordinary 96 per cent occupancy while posting the highest ADR and RevPAR ever recorded in the market, $409.36 and $393.03 respectively, with year-on-year growth approaching 50 per cent. In hotel terms, that is not a bump; it is a boundary.
Adelaide, never one to be left out of a good cricket story, delivered the series’ most dramatic surge. On December 18, ADR soared to $435.05 and RevPAR to $408.92, with year-on-year gains of 145 per cent and an eye-watering 326 per cent. Occupancy rose to 94 per cent in near-perfect conditions, on and off the field.
Brisbane also cashed in handsomely during the second Test, with occupancy peaking at 90.4 per cent and RevPAR reaching $363.56.
For the hotel sector, the lesson is as old as Don Bradman’s bat: when cricket travels, commerce follows.
And for Australia’s tourism economy, the Ashes has once again proved itself not merely a sporting contest but a quietly reliable export.
by Anne Keam – (c) 2026.
Read Time: 3 minutes
About the Writer.
Anne Keam’s story begins in Queensland, on a grain farm in the state’s wide western reaches, where the days were long and the lessons simple: work hard, look after your own, and don’t make a fuss. Those early years left their mark.
She later studied Arts at the University of Queensland, before doing what felt natural at the time, heading back home to the family property. But the world was calling. Anne packed a backpack and went looking, spending years on the road and finding herself most alive in South America. She wrote everything down along the way. Those notebooks, full of dust, colour and curiosity, eventually became her blog, a quiet, personal record of seeing the world and learning from it.
