The world’s hottest hotspot for hotel rates is India. In 2023, negotiated corporate rates rose 28 percent to 30 percent from 2022 levels, according to Tripbam. More increases can be expected next year. Aside from hyperinflation-afflicted Buenos Aires, the cities with the world’s projected highest year-over-year rate increases in 2024, according to the American Express Global Business Travel Hotel Monitor forecast, are Mumbai and Chennai at 15 percent and 14.6 percent, respectively.
Trade, geopolitics and demographics lie behind these extraordinary increases. In a November BTN Europe report, Tripbam head of business development for Europe Juliette Jackman attributed the rate jumps to “a lot of business moving from China to India.”
In part this is because China reopened slower than anywhere else after the Covid-19 pandemic. But some Western companies also are shifting their supply chains to India as their governments’ relationships with China deteriorate. In spite of his own…