As hotels negotiate with their clients for the rates and volumes for 2007, it seems likely that there will be mixed moods among the participants.
It is the hoteliers who are likely to be feeling more buoyant. In general terms the industry is doing well. London, for example, is enjoying its best year since 2000 and Paris and Frankfurt must be very pleased as well.
Demand is also outstripping supply in many regions of the world which means rates can be increased. BCD Travel Consulting in its 2007 Industry Forecast says supply is "lagging far behind demand" and predicts a rise of 6% in daily rates. Further it says the rise in rates is likely to continue until new hotel capacity becomes available which is not likely to be before 2008.
For travel buyers, this makes the outlook far from rosy. The only relief is that most of Europe, according to BCD, is a suffering from overcapacity which means that any rise in rates is likely to be under 0.5%. (This does not apply to booming London).
But for the buyers there is a further worry looming on the horizon: dynamic pricing which they do not like.
This is a concept of revenue management where hotels can change their price for a room not only on every day of the week but sometimes even during the same day, depending on demand.
It originated in America. But there the hotel market is different, being dominated far more by the chains than is the fragmented and more independent market of Europe. Nevertheless, US hotel groups like Marriott and Hilton are introducing it over here.
As Line Hein, travel manager responsible for hotels for Novo Nordisk, a Danish pharmaceutical company, made clear at the Association of Corporate Travel Executives' Forum in Helsinki, corporates need to see that they got value from deals with hotels.
With dynamic pricing, she said, you would have absolutely no idea if you had.
Corporates are generally more comfortable with negotiated fixed rates – there is transparency, you can see what you are getting, you know where you are. It is better than paying a different rate each time you use the hotel.
But it also means that on some occasions, the corporate's fixed rate is going to be actually higher than the daily rate being offered by the hotel.
So for part of the time, the travel manager is miffed that he or she is not getting the hotel's best rate while for the rest of the time the hotel manager feels he is filling his hotel at rates lower than he could have got on that day's market.
It is not an arrangement which makes either side happy. It is also undermining the traditional corporate/hotel deal.
This to an extent has already happened in the airline market where revenue management is far more firmly entrenched.
In aviation, travel managers and travel management companies are increasingly engaged in spot buying to get the best deal of the day. Consequently corporate/airline deals have declined in value.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, in the light dynamic pricing and spot buying, the decline of the corporate/hotel deal was also mooted in Helsinki.
Very few of the travel managers present said there were negotiating hotel programmes for 2007.
Soeren Bak Andersen, project manager for BCD Travel, commented: “Maybe there is a trend here. Maybe we are moving away from hotel programmes.
"I think in the future we will see more spot buying - this is what we have seen with the airlines.
"The only way to stop the increase in rates is to adopt the spot market approach and get the best deal available rate of the day."