Travel is often an early indicator of a softer consulting market. So when it comes to planes, trains and automobiles, consultants are reporting fewer trips for the second year in a row. But unlike last year's results, clients don't seem overly concerned with cutting travel costs.
Last year's Best Places to Stay survey saw a pretty significant pull back on travel from previous years, with consultants' trips shorter than they had been and clients growing more and more cost-conscious about those trips. This year's results could best be described as a mixed bag. With the economy continuing to hum along and consulting pipelines still strong, consultants continued last year's trend of traveling less, but this year's results don't indicate that their clients are pushing back on travel costs quite as much they did last year.
In 2016, 51 percent of consultants reported they spent more than 100 days a year on the road, but that number dipped to 46 percent last year. It's more of the same this year as that number is now 45 percent, the lowest since we began the survey more than a decade ago. And consider this: Road warriors who report spending more than 150 days on the road dipped from 22 percent last year to 16 percent this year. That number was 25 percent just three years ago.
