The fourth quarter ended with what appears to be strong business travel performance in a month not normally known for strong corporate demand, allowing hotel companies to beat their fourth-quarter and full-year revenue per available room projections and airlines to see strong increased in Q4 corporate demand, which a few already have indicated continued into January 2025.
• ARC referred to travel demand in December as a "surge," helped along by corporate buyers. The number of December trips sold by U.S. corporate agencies and settled by ARC increased more than 11 percent, higher than all but one month of 2024 (July), with overall passenger trips up 13 percent. The average December U.S. domestic fare was well up from a year prior, too.
• IATA called December demand "a strong finish" to a year in which traffic increased 10.4 percent globally year over year, and it also marked "a significant acceleration" from November.
• The strength of December business travel demand, particularly in the first two weeks of the month, seems to have taken analysts and hoteliers a little bit by surprise. (Hilton CEO Christopher Nassetta suggested corporate approval with clarity and outcome of Donald Trump's victory in the U.S. election was at least a partial impetus for strong post-election business travel and 2025 optimism. Time will tell.) Nearly every large U.S. hotel chain that issued full-year and Q4 RevPAR projections in the third quarter beat them.
