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 March 2023 travel index:
 | Avg Trip Spend | $1566.71 |  +0.9% | |
 | Avg Air Spend | $781.90 | +0.25% | |
 | Avg Hotel Spend | $578.03 |  +1% | |
 | Avg Car Rental Spend | $202.31 | +2% |
There was also an 8% Decrease in processed trips taken from March 2023 to April 2023.
** 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 **
April 2023 Analysis
- Processed trips continued to decline in April, seeing a significant drop with the beginning of Q2. While we are still up year over year from April 2022, it will be interesting to see how business travel is affected in the summer months. Q2 is traditionally steady, though not as explosive as the business travel in Q3.
- Hotel stays, hotel nights per trip, and car rentals, stabilized from March as well, keeping some of the gains from the spike in March across all categories. In fact, average nights per hotel stay (2.94) is the highest it’s been since August 2022, and average days per car rental (4.50) is at it’s highest point since July 2022.
- Prices are remarkably stable across all channels. In fact, this might be the least change we have recorded in average air, hotel, and car spend since we began keeping track in June of 2020.
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.