NBTA Introduces Index to Support Biz Travel Planning

Where are business travel spending and the economy headed in the coming months? The National Business Travel Association has built a new crystal ball to find out. It’s called Business Travel Quarterly Outlook – United States, and it aims to provide corporate travel managers and sellers insight into both short- and long-term trends in business travel volumes, spending and inflation.

The idea is to aggregate a broad swath of data, including gross domestic product (GDP and its components), corporate profits and cash flow, employment and unemployment data, the ISM Business Sentiment Index, travel-related components of the Consumer Price Index (airfare, lodging, food away from home, rental cars, fuel, transportation), Internet traffic to business travel-oriented websites, business travel alternatives such as GoToMeeting and WebEx and productivity rates for business travel spending, and supply variables such as capacity and occupancy/load factors. All the numbers are crunched into a single NBTA/Visa Business Travel Index (BTI).

The BTI uses 2005 as the 100 benchmark. Projections look eight quarters into the future. The 2011 Q3 BTI is 106 after hitting a peak of 120 in 2007 Q4 and a low of 96 in 2009 Q4. NBTA is projecting 107 for 2010 Q4, growing to 111 in 2011 Q4 and falling just short of 120 for 2012 Q4.

NBTA is positioning the BTI as more than a two-year look into the future of business travel spending. According to NBTA executive director and COO Mike McCormick, it’s a leading indicator for the U.S. economy and a benchmark for investment that can help travel managers and senior management plan internal business travel spend to enhance their company’s competitive position in the marketplace.  McCormick talked about the practical, on-the-job applications of the BTI with Fred Gebhart, Travel Market Report’s Business Travel Editor. 

Source=travelmarketreport