The poll of more than 540 tourism businesses by the Scottish Tourism Alliance found that almost half of businesses don’t have sufficient cash reserves for the next quarter.

Nearly 60% of respondents, meanwhile, said they wanted the Scottish government to delay progressing or introducing new regulation until the economy recovers.

The survey, which ran from 24 May to 14 June, saw responses from businesses representing 21 core tourism industry sub-sectors, with feedback spanning all 32 of Scotland’s local authority areas.

While a quarter (28%) of businesses said they were making a "good steady recovery", and a further 18% stating their businesses were "performing well", more than half (51%) said they felt "fairly" or "very" pessimistic about the outlook for their business.

Only 1% of respondents said their business was ready to expand.

Four in 10 respondents (41%) said they currently had fewer bookings for June to September compared with the same period last year, while an equal proportion said they were either "confident" or "reasonably confident" bookings would increase before or during the summer season.

Nearly two-thirds of respondents (64%) said they were staffed sufficiently to operate effectively, with the biggest barriers to recruiting and retaining new talent being a lack of available staff keen to work in the sector (31%) followed by Brexit and/or immigration rules (26%).

Some 49% of respondents said they did not support the introduction of a visitor levy in Scotland, with 26% stating their support for a policy depended on the net revenue raised by any such scheme being used "solely for tourism investment and enhancement".

STA chief executive Marc Crothall MBE said it was clear businesses were continuing to experience "significant" post-Covid challenges.

"The reality is that healthy trading is all about the bottom-line performance of the business," said Crothall. "While revenue may be strong for many businesses, the key to commercial success lies in the ability of that business to convert profit into sustainable recovery and growth.”