Travel Habits of Americans: Only 10 Percent of Americans Travel Frequently For Business

For all the attention paid to business travel worldwide, the absolute number of frequent business travelers remains small.

That’s borne out in our new survey on the “Travel Habits of Americans,” a series we launched last month exploring, as it says, the big picture travel habits of this United States.

This is the fifth survey in the series. We asked a simple question in this survey: “Would you consider yourself a frequent business traveler?” and to make sure respondents don’t have to think too much about what constitutes “frequent,” we had two yes choices “Yes, definitely” and “Yes, probably.”

The topline result: Only about 10 percent of adult Internet-using Americans consider themselves part of the frequent business travelers cohort. This is still a large 20-30 million Americans who say they travel frequently for business, but this also says there is a large majority of adult Americans still to be tapped, when it comes to business travel.

Important: This survey — not served to Skift users — was administered to almost 5000  of the U.S. adult internet population in Aug-Sep 2014, through Google Consumer Surveys. The methodology is explained here.

» Breakdown by sex, Chart 2 below: As to where the potential for growth lies more, women say they are less frequent business travelers, and hence more absolute numbers to grow here.

» Breakdown by age, Chart 3 below: The young Americans are more frequent business travelers, still climbing up the corporate ladder with life on the road.

» Breakdown by region, Chart 4 below: Rural Americans are the least frequent business travelers, while Urban Americans travel more for business.

» Breakdown by income, Chart 5 below: The middle income and richer Americans are more frequent business travelers, as it is to be expected.