We here at Cornerstone Information Systems have been working on a method to aggregate, anonymize, and distribute information about the health of the Travel Industry – gathered from all of the data that flows through our network every month. We feel that it is paramount that companies with data share our knowledge and the foresight it brings.
To facilitate that goal of data sharing, and yet also keep the data of our clients private, we have been working on the creation of a Cornerstone Index.
Here are the numbers regarding the December 2022 travel index:
 | Avg Trip Spend | $1423.52 |  3% | |
 | Avg Air Spend | $717.30 | 7% | |
 | Avg Hotel Spend | $519.84 |  -3% | |
 | Avg Car Rental Spend | $186.38 | 2% |
There was also a 31% Increase in processed trips taken from November 2022 to December 2022.
** All currency is displayed in USD – the aggregates of our data have been converted into USD before being taken into account and calculating the Index numbers **
December 2022 Analysis
- The spike in trips taken in December is more reminiscent of leisure than business travel this month, and while our data input has not changed, we are investigating why. In fact, it may be an interesting topic of a poll! Did you see more business travel this December than ‘usual’? Go ahead and leave us a comment if you have any insights!
- Prices fluctuated but not by too much, staying relatively stable at the end of the year. The biggest bump was in air cost, but this is also normal for the holiday season. Hotel and car both stayed relatively the same, with only some minor increases in their averages.
- 2022 ended with with an 87.7% increase in overall trips processed by Cornerstone over 2021. This is not only immensely significant, but incredibly heartening. We know it’s still tight out there and the culture around business travel may be in flux with new practices and new technologies, but this is a vote of confidence for our industry and one that we are only too glad to celebrate!
Information on the Cornerstone Index:
Much like how the S&P 500 Index tells the health of the US Stock Market, the Cornerstone Index is meant to reflect the health of the travel industry according to the data that we have available to us.
Please note that we are performing adjustments and cleansing to ensure an accurate index. This means that during our development of the travel index, some values may fluctuate month to month in their calculations. However, we do not believe this offsets major travel trends.