Harvard Study Finds Female Travelers Book Earlier, Saving Their Companies Millions
by Cheryl RosenWomen are the planners. So it’s no surprise that when the Harvard Business Review this week took a look at the booking patterns of men and women traveling for work, it found women plan their trips an average of two days earlier than men.
More surprising is that the two extra days of planning saved their companies an average of $113 per trip.
The HBR team mined data from 6.4 million flight bookings in 2014. It soon realized that the $113 is due to many differences between male and female business travelers, not just advance planning. Men are more likely to be high-level executives, for example, and so more apt to be flying in the front of the plane.
When controlling for those factors, though, the study still found that the two days of advance planning saved about $17 per trip, or about 2% of the average ticket price. For a multi-national company with 21,000 travelers, those two extra booking days can save $1 million a year.
