Business Travel Quarterly — United States (Visa)
Did you know GBTA not only monitors global business travel spending, but also tracks and forecasts US-originated business travel spending on a quarterly basis? How do we accomplish this? We take a LOT of data, crunch the numbers, use our expert insights, and spit out the results in one easy to understand number!
What data do we crunch? We start with a monthly survey of 60,000 households in the United States who detail all of their travel for the month, including business travel. We then add in a few other items, such as:
• U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and its components
• U.S. Corporate Profits and Cash Flow
• U.S. Employment & Unemployment
• ISM Business Sentiment Index
• Key Travel Components of CPI (airfare, lodging, food away from home, rental cars, fuel, transportation)
• Hitwise® data (www.hitwise.com) analyzing Internet traffic to business-oriented travel Websites and to potential travel alternative sites such as GoToMeeting and WebEx
• Productivity rates for business travel spending as a key business input to U.S. corporations
• Supply variables such as the number of rooms, occupancy, available Seat Miles (ASM), and rental car fleet size from various travel information vendors and government/NGOs.
From all this, we create the Business Travel Index™ or BTI™. The BTI™ simply represents total business travel spending in the United States. The index uses the 2nd quarter of 2005 as the base quarter, meaning it equaled 100 at that time. At the height of the last economic expansion in late 2007, the BTI™ soared to 120. In other words, business travel spending increased 20% in two years!
In an equally stunning reversal, merely two years later in late 2009 at the deepest point of the Great Recession and the global financial crisis, the BTI™ plummeted to 97. And now, we are on the road to recovery once again… at the end of 2010 the BTI™ was on the move, up to 108! What a roller coaster ride. Unfortunately, not everyone likes roller coasters.
If you want to know where business travel is heading next, you’ll need read this report!
This study also includes information on business travel trip volume, transient versus group travel, international outbound travel, and travel price inflation.
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