Business travel between Australia and the US among small and medium enterprises grew nine per cent in the first six months of 2026 compared with the same period last year, according to Corporate Traveller, the SME-specialist division of ASX-listed Flight Centre Travel Group.
The growth came in a year marked by economic and geopolitical disruption, including a 10 per cent US baseline tariff on Australian goods introduced in February after the Supreme Court struck down the prior tariff regime, and a conflict between the United States and Iran that erupted the same month, disrupting global aviation, shipping and oil markets for much of the first half.
Corporate Traveller global managing director Tom Walley said the result reflected how Australian SMEs operate under pressure.
“Nine per cent growth in a year like this tells you everything about how Australian SMEs operate – they don’t wait for the noise to settle, they get on the plane and get the deal done,” Walley said.
“The USA, has been and always will be, a critical trading partner for Australian businesses – with Education, Services, Information Technology, Government/NFP, and Finance and Insurance leading the charge for the top industries travelling to the States.”
SMEs account for close to 98 per cent of all Australian businesses and contribute more than half of national GDP, according to Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman data. Corporate Traveller said SMEs were the more confident segment of the corporate travel market for the rest of 2026, with the majority expecting travel budgets to grow, and that its own SME customers increasingly treated travel and expense management as a strategic priority.
Airline capacity between Australia and the US expanded materially in the first half of 2026. Delta Air Lines added a new nonstop service between Los Angeles and Melbourne in December 2025, Qantas upgraded its Dallas Fort Worth–Sydney service to the Airbus A380 from January 2026 and has confirmed a new Sydney–Las Vegas service launching later this year, and United Airlines launched the first-ever nonstop service between San Francisco and Adelaide in December 2025.
The period also saw an acceleration in formal trade cooperation between the two countries. Since Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and President Donald Trump signed the US–Australia Critical Minerals Framework in October 2025, the two governments have convened an inaugural ministerial meeting in Tokyo in March 2026 and issued a follow-up communiqué in April 2026 in support of an AU$8.5 billion pipeline of joint projects.
Walley said SME travel programs to the US were now taking on the complexity of major corporate accounts.
“SME travel to the US now looks like a big corporate program – multi-city itineraries, higher stakes, less room for error – except most of our customers are running it without a dedicated travel manager. That’s the exact gap we close,” Walley said.
