No travelling this year

Hoteliers should brace for a tough year in 2009. The continued drop in U.S. consumer confidence has a profoundly negative effect on demand, which causes increases in layoffs and joblessness. Lack of demand causes a slump in manufacturing, which in turn creates a slowdown in global commerce. This has a massive trickledown effect on business travel. Among the hundreds of thousands of layoffs reported in the United States alone, there are thousands of business travelers now removed from business travel circulation. Results of new survey from the Association of Corporate Travel Executives Tampa Bay are as expected. Seventy-one percent of respondents to the ACTE poll will spend less on travel in 2009, 21 percent said they will spend the same and only 8 percent said they will spend more. 

The ACTE 2009 Business Travel Spend Survey illustrates that the hardest hit area of business travel is internal meetings, which can constitute up to 40 percent of a travel budget. The growing popularity of electronic business travel alternatives is enabling companies to reclaim as much as $10 million from their travel budgets, without compromising their travel objectives.