Memorial Day is almost here, and it’s been raining surveys and travel trends. Everyone from AAA to Gallup, Deloitte, and numerous travel and hospitality companies have polled their customer base and come up with all kinds of trends and numbers for summer and Memorial Day weekend travel.

SummerzCool

The one thing everyone agrees on, though, is that Americans are planning to travel despite high gas prices. What’s more, this could be a pivotal year as travelers become “inured to high gas prices.”

AAA: According to AAA, 34.9 million Americans will travel 50 miles or more for the Memorial Day holiday weekend.

That’s a slender 0.2 percent (100,000 travelers) improvement over the 34.8 million travelers for 2010, which itself was a major 14 percent improvement over 2009.

About 30.9 million people plan to drive to their destination this year, as compared to 31 million last year. The number of air travelers is expected to increase 11.5 percent. The average price for regular gasoline is $3.91, compared to $2.85 this time last year.

TripAdvisor: Thirty-three percent of those surveyed said they’re planning to travel for the Memorial Day weekend, up from 29 percent last year. Among those planning to travel, 66 percent will be driving and 35 percent will be flying, as opposed to  70 and 29, respectively, last year.

This basically mirrors the AAA trend, which says that slightly more people will travel this year, but there’s a noticeable shift from driving to flying.

Gallup: Seventy-one percent of Americans traveling this summer predict they will spend more on transportation, as compared with 39 percent who said they would spend more on transportation last May. But it’s not stopping anyone, and Gallup rounds up the survey with the implication that Americans are becoming inured to high gas prices.

Deloitte: Twenty-two percent of respondents plan on taking a Memorial Day weekend leisure trip, compared with 19 percent last year.

What’s the most popular destination for Memorial Day 2011? Priceline says it’s Chicago’s North Michigan Avenue, while Orbitz says it is Las Vegas. For HomeAway.com users, it is Provincetown, Massachusetts.

A Springhill Suites survey finds out how travelers are planning to deal with vacation stress: Women worry more about money; men get haircuts. Midwesterners are more likely to yell at their kids. Northeasterners are more apt to ignore them. And Southerners turn most often to deep breathing.

A Wyndham survey asked respondents what they’d be willing to do for an all-expenses paid vacation. Thirty-nine percent said they’d be willing to watch C-SPAN for eight straight hours, 27 percent would shave their heads, and 31 percent would give up air conditioning all summer.

Photo – Sam Howzit

Related posts:
Summer Vacations and Family Travel on the Rise
How Will Rising Gas Prices Affect Travel Trends?

Richard Fain, chairman and CEO, Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. officially takes ownership of Oasis of the Seas .

The hype has been enormous — seminars touting the retractable roofs, interior balconies, ziplining, aqua theater, an elevator bar and a promenade that features real grass the employees have to mow. Heck, they’ve even signed Rihanna to provide entertainment in December. But despite the webinars, CLIA classes, brochures and emails telling the travel industry between the lines that Royal Caribbean’s Oasis of the Seas will invigorate profits, it’s now looking like … well, hype.

Even the world’s largest ship can’t overcome the plummet in discretionary income to persuade folks to book sooner than a few weeks out in this fourth quarter. Travel agents are telling Cruise Week that at the end of October, there’s still plenty of vacancy on Oasis for Christmas and New Years sailings, even though the $1.5 billion vessel is the most talked about new cruise ship to come along in years, the publication points out. This includes everything from the inside Category Q spaces to balcony categories, although the suites at the top of the pricing chain are sold out.

It’s the same story for the first quarter of 2010, too: suites sell, while agents paddle to get vacationers to commit to the rest of the ship. That 40 percent additional space to entertain as many as 6,360 passengers per sailing may turn into 40 percent more booking headaches as the recession continues.

And since Oasis also carries another accolade — world’s most expensive cruise ship — slow bookings can’t be too welcome within the accounting department at Royal Caribbean, particularly with sister ship Allure of the Seas hot on its heels in the shipyards.  Oasis is scheduled from December 2009 to April 2010 to offer 7-night trips from Ft. Lauderdale to St. Thomas, St. Maarten and the Bahamas. Beginning in May, the itinerary changes to Haiti, Jamaica and Mexico out of Port Everglades, one of the few large enough at the moment to allow Oasis to dock.

“It’s in the DNA of our company, about every 10 years, to take more or less a fresh sheet of paper and create the greatest cruise ship in the world,” CEO Adam Goldstein has said. He’d better hope he also reinvents American travel habits in the next 12 days as well.

Photography: Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd.

This post is part II of a series we’re doing on detecting travel trends and holiday weekend hotel booking patterns, based on an analysis of data collected by UpTake. In Part I, we saw the trends and patterns in the San Francisco market. In this post, we’ll be looking at the New York area data, which shows significant differences as compared to San Francisco.

W New York Union Square

The first data sample was taken on June 19, and the results of successive rate checks were noted down all the way through the 4th of July weekend and onwards to-date, leading up to Labor Day. The hotels included are all 3 or 4 star hotels in New York City, and spots ideal for drives out of New York City, like the Hudson Valley and Cape May, NJ.

Rates for the 4th of July weekend at hotels in New York City start creeping up surprisingly late. As of June 19, the 4th of July weekend rates at the W New York Union Square and The Benjamin Hotel were actually less than the weekend rates offered for bookings 4 weeks on. At the Sofitel New York, both the weekend rates and the 4th of July rates were exactly the same.

The same thing happened again, in the next sample taken on June 26. What does this mean? To make sense out of this, you have to look at the data for the rest of the New York region. In samples taken for both Cape May, NJ and hotels in the Hudson Valley, most units were completely sold out - as of June 19 – for 4th of July stays, which made the June 26 sample redundant.

In places perfect for getaways from the City – where bookings were still available as of June 19, such as the The Bell House in Hillsdale, rates were at a premium  -$175 for 4th of July bookings, as compared to $150 for weekend bookings 4 weeks on. 

This heavy demand in areas surrounding New York City, taken in conjunction with the lack of demand in New York City itself, suggests that during the 4th of July weekend, more people actually leave the City, than come in to visit. Mayor Bloomberg might want to dispute this notion, but numbers don’t lie.

Moving on to the Labor Day bookings, the trends are much brighter – and faster – for New York City. In the previous post, we saw that the cutoff date for Labor Day bookings in the San Francisco market is August 6 – beyond which the prices start going up beyond standard rates.

For New York, the cut-off date starts much earlier. In five successive rate checks conducted between June 19 and July 20, the Labor Day weekend rates for New York hotels held steady at rates less than advance booking rates for non-holiday weekends. But in the sample taken on July 26, the Labor Day rates for all sampled hotels in New York City shot up. 

The W New York Union Square offered $249 nightly weekend rates and $344/night for the Labor Day weekend. For the Sofitel New York, it was $225/$265.

Rates outside the City – in the Hudson Valley and in Cape May, NJ – did not go up for Labor Day. On the contrary, Labor Day rates at NYC getaway hotspots like the Albert Steven Inn in Cape May actually dropped to $165  in comparison to weekend rates of $210. Rates at the aforementioned Bell House in Hillsdale remained the same ($150) as weekend rates.

This means that less New Yorkers go out of the City for Labor Day, as compared to the 4th of July. The overall inference here is that New York City’s hotel booking patterns depend not only on incoming visitors to the City, but also heavily depend on the vacation patterns of NYC residents. Why this is so a matter we’ll discuss in a forthcoming post.

Photo courtesy Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide

Ask any executive why the business travel segment is suffering, and you’ll likely get an earful on how the government has stigmatized the traditional corporate meetings in Las Vegas and Hawaii.

business travel changes

Believe me, I like to make Uncle Sam my whipping boy at every opportunity, and the government has put a fear into companies who think a resort in Palm Desert looks nice for an incentive trip. But according to PhoCusWright’s U.S. Corporate Travel Distribution report, no less than seven trends are shaking up the status quo right now:

1. Balancing the Triple Bottom Line

Accounting now looks at a company’s environmental and social performance areas in addition to pure cash. It’s also known as “going green,” and with environmentalists blaming airlines for 7 percent of worldwide carbon emissions, it puts the squeeze on decisions involving lots of airport check-ins.

2. Putting the E Cart Before the T Horse.

A clever way of saying “we want to reconcile booked vs. ticketed vs. pre-trip vs. spend vs. reconciled (or post-trip) travel data.” Still scratching your head? According to PhoCusWright, it means companies want to pull all of their travel partnerships into one end-to-end solution.

3. Business Travel Goes Retail: Supply Chain Management

When the going gets tough, the tough expect their partners to share insider information on their key performance indicators, too. Companies with corporate travel accounts want to see risk-reward set ups that give them extra perks for exceeding their terms — luckily, they’re willing to pay a penalty for missing, too.

business travel on the move

4. Traveler-Centric vs Trip-Centric Buying

Thanks to the Internet, travelers of all stripes expect a little “me” in everything they book. The game isn’t about finding a great destination now at a great price — it’s also about knowing this traveler’s history and profile at the same time.

5. Going Mobile

Nearly 70 percent of frequent business travelers have a smartphone somewhere on their person. Corporate travel players need to know how to send down itinerary changes, boarding passes and other pertinent information to these phones. Pretty soon, they’ll be demanding e-wallet payment options, too, so look lively, industry.

6. Video Conferencing: Traveling Without the Trip

Face it, if companies can set up face-to-face meetings over the Internet without the travel drama, they’re going to run with the opportunity.

7. SMEs Become Big Business

SME stands for small and mid-sized enterprises, that group of businesses whose employees do some travel, but they’ve always just asked a secretary to make the booking on Expedia. The recession is actually an excellent time for the travel industry to introduce itself to these dollars, as any offer to help save time and money gets bigger play today.

Photography: laverrue, vandelizer