Hotel prices are increasing: tips to keep T&E in check

This week, we’re highlighting the most interesting trends from our newly released Fall 2024 Spending Report. See our first post on the latest AI that companies are buying.

Fall conferences are in full swing—and travel expenses are rising accordingly. At Ramp, our data show average travel card spend shot up 14% in August and 8% in September.

But this increase isn’t just from the seasonal uptick in trip volume. Prices are also going up: average car rental amounts grew 24% between March and July, and hotel transaction amounts have jumped 17% since June. According to Deloitte’s 2024 corporate travel study, high travel prices are increasingly causing some companies to cut back on trips, even though doing so could inhibit business growth.

To help you better manage travel costs, we analyzed spending patterns in the nation’s most frequented cities.

Lodging costs are rising—but increases differ by city

Prices increased this year for nearly every city we track, but not all. Nashville saw the biggest jump in nightly rates (80%), while New York and Seattle rates actually decreased 5% and 4% respectively.

Hotels charge a premium for conferences—here’s how much

To save on costs, avoid traveling to cities with major conferences unless you’re attending. A few Ramp team members learned this the hard way this past May, when they headed to San Francisco for a team offsite during the RSA conference. Tight inventory and higher-than-normal prices forced some to (voluntarily) stay in hostels!

Hotel itineraries uploaded to Ramp show just how high of a price you can expect to pay. A few examples:

• ‍Dreamforce 2024: Of the major conferences we analyzed, Dreamforce had the worst pricing discrepancy. Median nightly rates in San Francisco soared a whopping 61% in the week of the conference compared to two weeks earlier.

• SXSW 2024: 300,000 people attended SXSW this year, pushing Austin median nightly rates 28% higher the week of the conference than the three weeks prior.

• CES 2024: Headed to Vegas in January? If this year’s data is any indication, bookings during the week of CES will be 28% more expensive than in the prior weeks, so plan accordingly.

Ensuring your team doesn’t book offsites or team visits in cities during major conferences will help you save. Here are some upcoming dates and locations to avoid if possible:

• Chicago, November 12-15, 2024 (Microsoft Ignite)
• San Diego, November 19-20, 2024 (BrightonSEO)
• Las Vegas, December 2-6, 2024 (​​AWS re:Invent)
• Las Vegas, January 7-10, 2025 (CES)

Tips to keep costs in check

Since the launch of Ramp Travel earlier this year, hundreds of businesses have created travel policies on the platform to control employee spending before employees even book. For example, policy admins can block employees from booking business class altogether or if flights don’t meet a certain minimum length. They can use dynamic market rates to take seasonality and location into account when issuing limits, giving wider margin to employees traveling to more expensive areas.

These policies are working:

On average, Ramp businesses with policies spend 21% less on airfares and 6% less on hotels than those without.

With inflation and the economy still top of mind for many businesses, an easy way to save money is to keep your business travel under budget in the coming months. In case you need peer guidance, here are the average policy and booking metrics that businesses currently use in Ramp Travel:

See more spending benchmarks by industry and company size on our microsite. There, you can grab a full copy of our Fall 2024 Spending Report. Come back to the blog tomorrow to see how businesses are spending ahead of the holidays, especially in retail.