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 September 2023 travel index:
 | Avg Trip Spend | $1473.63 |  +1.6% | |
 | Avg Air Spend | $723.22 | +8% | |
 | Avg Hotel Spend | $559.14 |  -3% | |
 | Avg Car Rental Spend | $191.27 | -6% |
There was also a 2.5% decrease in processed trips taken from August 2023 to October 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 **
September 2023 Analysis
- While August’s total trips processed outpaced the entire rest of the summer by a fair amount, September held steady, losing only a little momentum. With a 2.5% dip, Q3 is still going strong as it traditionally does. We expect October to maintain the momentum before seeing the usual holiday dips in November and December.
- Air travel costs increased somewhat, due perhaps in part by the robust gains in overall trips being taken. Despite this though, both car rental costs and hotel costs dipped, though not too dramatically.
- Much like with total air trips processed seeing a slight decrease, there was also a slight dip in the average nights per hotel booking and average days per car rental, though not by significant margins. Nights per hotel stay dipped from 2.95 to 2.81 (-4.7%). Days per car rental dipped 4.41 to 4.21 (-4.5%).
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.