The figure is expected to continue to grow, with results from a survey conducted by Tourism Central Australia (TCA) still coming through.

TCA chairman Patrick Bedford said that business owners were “bleeding money while operating with a lot less people and a full complement of staff”.

“We’re in a predicament worse than last year … there’s no support from JobKeeper, or from the governments in general,” he said.

Mr Bedford, who is also the managing director of Emu Run Experience, said his business had lost $500,000 worth of bookings recently.

“Business owners are in the uncertainty of not ­knowing whether to keep staff, (when) we’ve only had three months income,” Mr Bedford said.

“The beginning of the ­season was going really good and we literally just got back to capacity,” he said.

“We’ve hired some new staff and now we’re basically back to having no work for the staff and we’re still paying all those guys full salary.”

Mr Bedford said that after thousands gathered in ­Sydney over the weekend, he believed parts of NSW could be in lockdown for another six months.

“In the near future operators will either close up, be in a bad financial position for numerous years or will be paying off debt to keep the doors open,” he said.

Mr Bedford said statistics had proved that once lockdowns lifted, it took four to six weeks to rebuild confidence before people started travelling again.

Finke River Adventures owner Brenton Schild said that his small business lost $65,000 in cancellations just over the two-day lockdown in Alice Springs.

Mr Schild said in some cases up to 70 per cent of a tourism business’ annual income came in June and July.

In July 2019, Finke River Adventures had 74 tours booked at an average of 76 per cent capacity.

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This month, there are nine bookings left that are sitting at an average of 16 per cent capacity.

“The money that you make in those two months carries you through summer,” Mr Schild said.

“Some of us have experienced up to a 90 per cent drop in bookings.

“Rather than banking money of late, we’re actually cashflow-negative because of having to refund.

“People are cancelling bookings that are two to three months out because they are losing confidence about ­border closures.

“We need things basically very similar to what we had last year (like JobKeeper). We need some sort of wage or salary support, and we need business income.

“The position many operators are in right now is they’re quite simply out of money. There are going to be many, many operators who don’t exist come Christmas, or if not well before that.”

Mr Schild said the flow-on effects to the local economy would be “frightening”.

“They go broke because they can’t pay their bills and that means somebody who’s not associated with the tourism industry also gets hurt,” he said.

Uluru Segway Tours operator Mark Swindells said the 2021 tourism season started off “exceptionally well” before it started to diminish at the end of June.

“We had one lady who had booked five trips out to ­Central Australia and all of them were cancelled,” Mr Swindells said.

“She got here on the sixth trip, so it shows people with a bit of persistence still get through, but people are losing confidence.

“We have refunded considerably more this year than we did in March last year.

“You only get one winter holiday a year and we put on extra staff and we opened up more tours.

“We’re still doing tours, but the clip is coming very quickly for us. It’s coming to the point in the next couple of days we will grind to a halt.”

Mr Swindells said the JobKeeper incentive introduced in 2020 was “phenomenal”.