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 November 2021:
 | Avg Trip Spend | $1379.31 |  -0.8% | |
 | Avg Air Spend | $613.24 | -0.1% | |
 | Avg Hotel Spend | $526.47 |  -5% | |
 | Avg Car Rental Spend | $239.60 |  +6% |
There was also a 11% decrease in processed trips taken from October 2021 to November 2021.
** 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 **
November 2021 Analysis
- November saw the beginning of the annual stall in business travel, but that is as expected with the coming of the holiday season. The exciting news here is that even with the holiday dip, November was still the ninth highest month for PNRs processed through Cornerstone in 2021. That is a very heartening number as we move into 2022.
- Air spend stayed very stable between October and November. In fact, if there have been any sort of holiday markup in costs, we have not been detecting it in our own processed PNRs.
- Minor fluctuations in hotel and car costs offset each other to keep average trip costs roughly the same between October and November. We will be interested to see how the year end numbers play out.
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.
