Global Business Travel Spending Set to Rise 9.2 Percent in 2011

Global Business Travel Spending Set to Rise 9.2 Percent in 2011
By James Shillinglaw

The GBTA Foundation, the research arm of the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA), released the Global Business Travel Spending Outlook 2011-2015, a study sponsored by Visa that shows business travel spend around the world increased 8.4 percent in 2010, after falling 7.8 percent in 2009. Moreover, global spending on business travel is projected to grow another 9.2 percent in 2011 to just over $1 trillion.

According to the study the global economic recovery is occurring at two different speeds and that is reflected in the recovery of global business travel. Compound annual growth in business travel spending in Brazil, Russia, India and China is projected to grow two to three times faster than in developed economies like the U.S., France, Germany and the U.K.

Projected compound annual growth in business travel spend for 2011-2015 will be 11.2 percent for China, 5.4 percent for the U.K., 10.8 percent for India, 3.8 percent for the U.S., 7.1 percent for Russia, 3.3 percent for France, 7 percent for Brazil, and 2.9 percent for Germany.

“The recovery is happening, it's just not happening as quickly as most people would like,” said Michael McCormick, GBTA executive director and COO. “Several countries are seeing the rebound happen at a much faster and more stable pace, and we're seeing that in the pace of business travel spending in the economies of China, India, Russia and Brazil. We're still bullish on business travel and all signs point towards continued growth.”

Global business travel spending bounced back 8.4 percent to $924 billion in 2010 after falling 7.8 percent in 2009. Global spending on business travel is projected to grow another 9.2 percent in 2011 to just over $1 trillion.

Rapid growth in the developing world is juxtaposed with troubles with debt, real estate, and a slowdown in consumption in the developed world. New patterns of consumption, a relative change in the volume of major trade routes, and industrial innovation have begun to shape a new world order in the patterns, volume, and regional distribution of global business travel.

GBTA has constructed a measure of the current and projected level of business travel – the Business Travel Index (BTI). The global BTI has been derived from total business travel spending and has been indexed on a base year of 2005. The Global BTI currently sits at 133 (2010). It is forecast to grow to 145 through 2011 and should reach 193 by 2015. As a point of comparison, the U.S. BTI was 109 in 2010, whereas in China, India and the U.K. it was 286, 197 and 95, respectively.