Top global travel companies by sales 1991 vs. 2023

While most of the leading global travel companies focused mainly on business travel in 1991, leisure travel gradually gained more importance over the next thirty years. By 2023, the leisure travel market was much larger than its business travel counterpart. That year, Booking Holdings and Expedia Group were the travel companies recording the highest gross sales worldwide, generating roughly 151 billion and 104 billion U.S. dollars, respectively. These figures surpassed the gross sales reported by the leading travel companies in 1991 by a significant margin. In 1991, American Express and Carlson Travel Network, known today as CWT, topped the ranking, with sales amounting to 6.9 billion and 3.4 billion U.S. dollars, respectively.

Leading travel companies worldwide in 1991 and 2023, by gross sales (in million U.S. dollars)

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Release date

June 2024

More information

Region

Worldwide

Survey time period

1991 and 2023

Supplementary notes

¹ Carlson Travel Network changed its name to CWT in 2019.

² In 2008, Liberty Travel was acquired by Flight Centre Travel Group.

³ Expedia Group did not take part in the survey provided by the source. Data came from the groups' public financial reports.

⁴ American Express Travel did not take part in the survey provided by the source. The figure is an estimate.

Figures refer to global gross sales of travel products. For the 2023 data, the source only included companies generating at least 110 million U.S. dollars in travel sales in 2023, with a minimum of 15 percent of the sales volume in the United States. The companies also had to be the agent of record on the transaction from a supplier's perspective.

For the purpose of this statistic, figures have been compiled from two different articles by Travel Weekly (1991 data from here; 2023 data from here).

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