Sifting through data compiled over the course of the past year, American Express Global Business Travel (GBT) has released its latest business travel snapshot, revealing the top domestic and international business travel destinations for 2014 in addition to a number of other insights.
Based on actual booking data from U.S.-based business travelers, the two biggest takeaways from the report are the rankings of the most visited cities among road warriors last year.
Here’s a look at the top 10 domestic destinations:
- Chicago
- San Francisco
- New York
- Philadelphia
- Phoenix
- Seattle
- Los Angeles
- Houston
- Minneapolis
- Dallas
GBT also revealed the top five domestic city pairs for 2014, four of which included the Big Apple, unsurprisingly. New York-Chicago was the most popular route, followed by Boston-New York, New York-San Francisco, Dallas/Fort Worth-Chicago and Atlanta-New York.
LaGuardia Airport accounted for all of the aforementioned routes involving New York.
Meanwhile, Canada accounted for 20 percent of the top 10 international destinations for business travelers last year, with Toronto and Montreal each making the cut.
Here’s the breakdown for most-visited international cities:
- London
- Toronto
- Mexico City
- Cancun
- Shanghai
- Paris
- Tokyo
- Sao Paulo
- Montreal
- Amsterdam
New York-London via John F. Kennedy International Airport and London Heathrow Airport was the top international city pair in 2014, followed by Newark-London.
New York-Toronto, London-Chicago and Chicago-Toronto rounded out the top five.
GBT’s business travel snapshot also found that a whopping 95.6 percent of business travelers flew coach on domestic flights last year, compared to just 65.8 percent on international flights.
Though a higher percentage of business travelers flew first class on domestic flights (4.4 percent) than international flights (2.6 percent), a combined 31.7 percent flew business class or premium coach on international flights.
Finally, GBT’s research revealed that professional services, technology/communication, and manufacturing were the top traveled industries over the course of 2014.
Although the findings are sure to differ in 2015, how significantly they will remains to be seen.
