Business Travel Index Sees Price Hike

Ovation Corporate Travel has published its Annual Business Travel Index. The results provide a snapshot of the past five years’ worth of average prices paid for air and hotel travel as well as domestic and international travel patterns over a variety of industries.

Overall, the survey found that while the cost of business travel remained low overall, in the fourth quarter, prices began to rise for air travelers.

“For the first three quarters of 2017, we saw the average prices paid for domestic flights at or near five-year lows across all three indexes,” said Ovation executive vice president, Michael Steiner. “Q4 broke that trend, with domestic average prices paid spiking up notably over recent years’ Q4 averages.”

The same upward trend was visible in other areas of the industry and around the world but still remains mostly stable.

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“Internationally, we saw a similar, though not as definitive, spike in average airfare prices paid for Q4,” noted Steiner. “At the same time, these industry groups remained relatively steady in terms of year-over-year patterns for class of service and domestic versus international travel, with small shifts across the board in terms of these travel patterns.”

Accommodation costs have continued to rise at a steady pace.

“On the hotel side, we continue to see domestic hotel average room rates paid increasing, for the most part, year over year, while international hotel average room rates paid increased less steadily,” said Steiner.

This year, Ovation’s Annual Business Travel Index includes a new section, “2018 Negotiated Hotel Room Rates by City.” The added data gives a more detailed picture in top hotel markets.

‘With the addition of the ‘2018 Negotiated Hotel Room Rates by City’ analysis, we can point to top hotel markets and their average negotiated room rate increase/decrease year over year,” said Steiner. “For example, Denver was the city with the greatest average negotiated hotel rate increase in 2018 vs. 2017 with an average increase of 4.5 percent while Beijing had the greatest year-over-year decrease, with negotiated room rates down 2.95 percent on average.”

The new data provides a city-by-city analysis of negotiated hotel room rates in the top hotel markets for Ovation’s proprietary Preferred Hotel Partners Program showing either average percentage increase or decrease in a city’s room rates, year-over-year, for 2018 as compared to 2017.

Ovation provides a complete snapshot of the survey results here.