In early 2026, before Uber’s regional expansion team had formally approached us, we asked the Broome Chamber of Commerce and Industry a simple question: would your members tell us, on the record, what’s broken about transport here.
77 businesses responded. The number matters. Broome has roughly 350 active members on the Chamber register. A 22% response rate to a voluntary, non-incentivised survey is high for any business association. It says people wanted to be heard.
Who replied
The respondents broke down across the sectors that actually run Broome:
- Tourism operators — the largest single cluster, from accommodation providers and tour companies to the family businesses running the air-conditioned shuttle from the airport to Cable Beach.
- Mining and resource contractors — companies servicing the Kimberley and Pilbara sites who fly people through Broome International on rotation.
- Health and community services — primary care, allied health, NDIS providers, Aboriginal medical services. Staff and clients moving between Broome and remote communities.
- Retail and trades — main street businesses, hire companies, electricians, plumbers.
- Government and professional services — local Shire roles, accountants, lawyers.
We didn’t pre-segment the data. We asked everyone the same set of questions about how reliably their staff, customers and operations could move around the region.
What we asked
The survey was 14 questions, took most respondents under five minutes, and was anonymous unless the respondent chose to leave a name. The headline question groups:
- Disruption frequency — how often has unreliable transport interrupted your operations in the last 12 months?
- No-shows — have taxis or pre-booked transport failed to arrive when you needed them?
- Pricing concerns — have your customers or staff reported being overcharged on private transport, particularly airport runs?
- Demand signal — would your business support, and use, a rideshare service like Uber in Broome?
- Importance rating — on a 1 to 5 scale, how important is improving transport to your business operations?
We also left two free-text fields for verbatim feedback. The verbatims turned out to be the most useful part of the dataset.
Why we ran it
Two reasons.
First, we’d been running passenger transport in the Kimberley for 23 years through Plum Oak. We had an operator’s view of the problem — but operator views are biased. We needed customer data to either confirm what we were seeing or correct it.
Second, we knew Uber Australia was looking at regional expansion. If we were going to be a serious operator in that conversation, we needed evidence rather than anecdote.
The survey ended up doing both. The data confirmed our operating hypothesis — Broome’s existing transport network is structurally unable to meet business demand — and it gave us the foundation to walk into Uber’s regional team with a numbers-backed case rather than a story.
What’s next in this series
The next two pieces in this Research series go through the findings in detail.
Post 02 covers what’s broken — wait times, no-shows, airport pricing. Post 03 covers what businesses want — and what we’re doing about it.
If you’re a Broome business and you want to add to this dataset, get in touch. We’ll be re-running the survey in late 2026 to track whether things have improved.