Here at Cornerstone Information Systems, we 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.
Here are the numbers regarding the November 2023 travel index:
 | Avg Trip Spend | $1348 |  -3.7% | |
 | Avg Air Spend | $689 |  +4.7% | |
 | Avg Hotel Spend | $483 | -11.6% | |
 | Avg Car Rental Spend | $176 | -10.3% |
There was also a 20% decrease in processed trips from October 2023 to November 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 **
November 2023 Analysis
- Welcome to the 2023 winter holiday! We’ve clearly begun seeing the annual decline in business travel as we approach the end of Q4. Expect December to look quite similar in terms of total volume. Although interestingly, travel volume picked up in Dec 2022 over Nov 2022, so we are willing to be surprised again this year. Will December business travel become a post-covid trend? Or will it remain a one off? We’ll find out!
- While air spend remained pretty stable, hotel/night and car rental/day spend decreased by a significant amount. We saw hotels get cheaper around the holidays last year as well, so this is no huge surprise. Average air spend per trip went up slightly, keeping the average cost per trip relatively stable with last month.
- One metric that we have not tracked directly in the Cornerstone Index, but will be keeping a close eye on this year are delays and cancellations. We are working on aggregating the data necessary to report on this since post-covid winter holiday seasons saw such a dramatic increase in both of those metrics. We wrote an article here with separate graphs on the subject, and will continue to explore folding this metric into the Index going forward.
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.