Between record amounts of snow and the New Orleans Saints winning the Super Bowl it certainly has been an unusual year already! So, I am only encouraged that 2009 is far behind us.

For 2010, we are celebrating our 25th Anniversary and are excited about the launch of our Humanitarian Travel division. Feel free to take a look at www.HumanitarianTravel.net and see all of the good things we are doing. Lastly, we have expanded into Connecticut and are managing the corporate travel for a large regional travel management company in Waterbury.

So, we’ve been a little busy but what does travel in 2010 mean to you?

Here are some thoughts to consider:

We expect there will be greater TSA security at the airports
The overall cost of travel will increase slightly in 2010:
If the price of fuel remains at or near current levels, U.S. domestic airfares will increase less than 5%.
The price of hotel rooms around the country will not increase.
The price to rent a car will remain the same in 2010.
Airline fees will increase in 2010. Make sure to get status with as many carriers as possible to avoid getting “nickel and dimed”. Talk to us about this!
Corporate Travel Policies are expected to remain the same as last year.
Southwest will continue to market no fees for bags but will come up with other fees to remain competitive.

Paying closer attention to airline average ticket prices, we did a comparison (2009/2008) and we found Safe Harbors overall average ticket for domestic travel reduced by 11% while international airfares reduced by 13%.

As discussed in the above bullet points, we don’t expect this downward trend to continue but do expect a sharp increase of creative fees by the airlines.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 26th, 2010 at 3:34 pm and is filed under Corporate Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.