They fly less and book early
Women business travellers cost much less than their male counterparts, new research by AirPlus International has revealed.
Not only do they book much earlier than men but they get noticeably cheaper flights, Christian Gall, the card company's executive director international markets, said.
Mr Gall said that on average a woman traveller booked her flight 19.2 days before she travelled. For men the comparable figure was 15.4 days.
Women got an average flight price of €1505 for business class and €230 for economy while men paid €1575 for business and €277 for economy.
Mr Gall told the Crossroads Paris conference, organised by the Paragon Partnership and attended by 200 delegates from Europe and America, that women fly less, buy early, sit in economy and incur less costs than men.
Earlier in his presentation, Mr Gall said that in the recession, the priority of companies in the US and Asia Pacific regions was stopping travel with 19% and 25% of companies, respectively, freezing travel in those two regions.
In Europe Mr Gall said only 5% of companies had stopped travel.
The priority of European travel managers was to spend less with sales of air tickets down 11%, hotels 12% and rail tickets 6%.
Car rentals numbers had fallen form 61,000 last October to 30,000 in March, Mr Gall said.
Hotels spend in both the UK and Germany had dropped from, respectively, €232 and €170 a stay last October to €174 and €139 in March.
Mr Gall said the top five things a travel manager could do to save money was to cancel as many trips as possible, move form business class to economy, negotiate new supplier deals, enforce the travel policy and employ best practices.
But he warned that things were not going to improve much in 2010.
He predicted there would be little if any change in air fares, a moderate fall in hotel rates, surcharging by all industry players with the practice becoming more and more common and strong support from top management to enforce stricter travel policies and cost cutting.
www.airplus.com www.paragon-partnership.org