Business Travel Per Diems for 200 Global Cities

BTN’s 2024 Corporate Travel Index is the business travel industry's definitive resource for business travel costs in 200 cities around the world. Use it to benchmark your current program or to offer insights into rate trends in the markets you care about most. The index is unique in that it tracks actual corporate booked hotel and car rental rates using data from managed travel sources, not consumer data, to reflect actual managed travel activity as opposed to theoretically available rates.

Hotel, car rental and safety data are updated quarterly in BTN's Corporate Travel Index Calculator, where users can customize per diem snapshots based on the class of service allowed by their travel policies for hotel and car rental categories. Meal costs and taxi rates are updated annually. Five years of data are now available in the calculator, allowing for year-over-year or quarter-over-quarter comparisons.

Most Recent Quarterly Data Tables

BTN offers its most recent quarterly Corporate Travel Index data in summary documents available for download. These tables include all 200 cities and are calculated using data for all classes of service, including economy, midscale, upscale, upper upscale and luxury for hotel rates and compact, midsize and full-size rental car rates. 

Methodology

Hotel Rates: Advito, Emburse and Prime Numbers provide quarterly aggregated, anonymized, quarterly U.S. rates booked by corporate clients across five hotel tiers. Advito, HRS and Prime Numbers provide parallel data for non-U.S. cities. BTN provides taxes and fees for U.S. cities on an annual basis.

Car Rental Rates: Advito, Emburse and Prime Numbers provide quarterly aggregated, anonymized, quarterly U.S. car rental rates booked by corporate clients across three car rental tiers. Advito provides combined local tax and fee data.

Meal Prices: BTN rebuilt its meal and restaurant database in 2023. BTN will update meal data annually, using the following methodology.

U.S. Meal Data: Cities with annual GDP above $95 billion: BTN surveyed six independent restaurants and three hotel restaurants for breakfast; for each lunch and dinner, they surveyed six chain and six independent restaurants. For smaller cities, BTN surveyed two independent restaurants and one hotel restaurant for breakfast and three chain and three independent restaurants for each lunch and dinner. Breakfast is based on an egg entree with fruit and coffee or juice. Lunch is an entree-style salad or sandwich, pizza, burrito, etc. with fruit; fries or chips; and nonalcoholic beverage. Dinner is protein-based entree; small salad; cheese tray or dessert; glass of wine. Sample breakfast restaurants include Denny’s, IHOP and Starbucks. Lunch chains include Chili's, Panera and Bonefish Grill. Dinner chains include Cheesecake Factory and Capital Grille.

Non-U.S.Meal Data: Breakfast is based on continental breakfast. For lunch and dinner in each city that has a population of 1.5 million or more, BTN surveyed 12 restaurants; in each smaller city, they called six. BTN converted prices from local currency to U.S. dollars on February 15, 2023. Lunch is based on a sandwich, salad and nonalcoholic drink. Dinner is based on a fish, chicken or beef entree; salad; a dessert or cheese tray; glass of wine.

Taxi Rates: BTN compiles taxi rate data annually using Rome2Rio.

Risk Scores: GeoSure synthesizes near real-time traveler safety data using a proprietary combination of Big Data predictive analytics, artificial intelligence/natural language processing and crowdsourced input. GeoSafeScores powered by GeoSure incorporate structured and unstructured data from sources like the United Nations, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, World Health Organization, Interpol, The World Bank, FBI and the U.S. State Department, as well as macro sources like inflation trends, education, income levels, political stability, trending health and disease data, neighborhood-level police presences, healthcare facility proliferation and infrastructure characteristics. BTN updates risk data quarterly.