Australia Beach hotels can be numbered in the hundreds, probably thousands, and they run the same full range of standard, budget, and theme as do the properties along the coast of the United States. There is beachfront lodging in Australia in luxurious world-class resorts; budget motels and backpacking hostel; exclusive and expensive island retreats; convivial caravan parks and campgrounds; bed and breakfast inns in cities and on ranches; and beach rentals of all descriptions. You will find motels with little kitchenettes, and resorts with gourmet dining overseen by internationally respected chefs—and everything in between.

Most beachfront lodging in Australia will be found concentrated in the most heavily visited part of this island nation, its eastern seaboard, from about Hyams Beach on Jervis Bay in the south to Port Douglas and Cairns, gateways to the Great Barrier Reef in the north. Here you will find what may be the country’s most exclusive and luxurious resort, the sumptuous Palazzo Versace in Gold Coast. On the other end of the scale is the Airlie Beach Backpackers, one of the country’s many hostels, with modest private rooms and mixed sex or female only dormitories. Most of the Australia beach accommodation available along the Sunshine Coast region consists of beach rentals, from modest cottages to grand high-rise apartment buildings, all with fully equipped kitchens.

There are also Australia beach hotels clustered on the southern coast around Melbourne and the island of Tasmania, and Adelaide, gateway to Kangaroo Island. These two islands (the country’s first and third largest) as well as the beautiful Whitsunday Islands off the coast of Airlie Beach also have plenty of beachfront lodging in Australia that is both unique and blessed with some of the country’s most accessible, rare, and unusual wildlife. The Kangaroo Island Health Retreat is a fairly expensive and completely alcohol, nicotine, and drug-free. There is a decadent Club Med on Lindeman Island in the Whitsunday Islands.

Australia Map

Excellent, but scattered, Australia beach accommodation can be found in the small and extremely remote communities on the far western coast. Here you will find attractions like virtually deserted Cable Beach abutting the vast desert Outback and things to do such as swimming with huge whale sharks around pristine Ningaloo Reef. In these types of places, your vacation experience and type of Australia beach accommodation relies more on a breathtakingly extraordinary location and environment than on luxury amenities. The Ningaloo Resort in Coral Bay (pictured) is more of a three-star motel standard, with the unique environment providing the “resort.” atmosphere.

Many of the Australia beach hotels are part of the country’s history. The Appollonian Hotel in Boreen on the Sunnshine Coast is a traditional bush pub and roadhouse dating to 1879, and offers bunkhouse-style ranch lodging. Many of the hotels on the Surfers Paradise section of Gold Coast draw on the history of the surfing boom that began in the 1920s. By far, the most numerous and most popular kind of accommodation everywhere in the country are beach rentals that range from high-rise apartment buildings to little beach cottages.