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, especially in light of the recent crises, it is paramount that companies with data share our knowledge and the foresight it brings so that we might not experience a repeat of the crash that accompanied the emergence of COVID.
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.
Work on this project is still in progress, but we wanted to share with you our biggest numbers coming out of the Index regarding January 2022:
 | Avg Trip Spend | $1312.21 |  +0.3% | |
 | Avg Air Spend | $523.97 |  -8.4% | |
 | Avg Hotel Spend | $564.09 |  +7.5% | |
 | Avg Car Rental Spend | $224.15 | +5% |
There was also a 38% increase in processed trips taken from December 2021 to January 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 **
January 2022 Analysis
- Happy New Year to all of our readers! The holiday slump for business travel is over and we have recovered from it with a great surge. January’s total trips processed by Cornerstone is higher than either Dec or Nov of last year, giving us all a great start to 2022.
- Interestingly, despite some price fluctuations, the overall trip cost stayed relatively the same. Granted, we did not see any significant spikes or dips in prices from Dec to Jan, with all of the changes being within single digits of a percentage point from one month to the next.
- We are heartened to see such a strong start to 2022. Overall, January 2022 is the second most traveled month according to our records compared to all of last year. The only month with a higher travel volume according to our index was October 2021. Hopefully we see this only increase as the year goes on.
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 index, some values may fluctuate month to month in their calculations. However, we do not believe this offsets major trends.
In the future, this will become an interactive app closely resembling our TravelOptix platform. At that time, we will be including functionality for different currencies. We are welcoming any feedback regarding this idea, and look forward to providing this information going forward.
