The financial pages still offer investors plenty to worry about from day to day, but a new survey of small businesses conducted by American Airlines finds considerable optimism about the economic outlook and the amount of traveling their employees will be doing in the months ahead.

American polled more than 1,100 companies in its Business ExtrAA program for small and medium-sized ventures, and found that 86 percent expect their level of travel to stay the same or increase by up to 24 percent in the next 12 months. Six percent predicted an increase of 25 percent or more.

Perhaps their enthusiasm for hitting the road stems from the fact that 93 percent of the respondents said they consider face-to-face meetings as either helpful or crucial to their business. And 71 percent said they expect the nation’s economic outlook to improve over the next year and a half.

Two-thirds of the businesses surveyed said most of their business travel is domestic, while 14 percent conduct mostly international trips. Twenty-one percent said their business travel is equally split between the two.

The most visited domestic cities for business include New York, Chicago, Dallas/Ft. Worth, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, Washington D.C., Las Vegas, Atlanta and Boston, the survey found. Travel managers surveyed listed Hilton and Marriott as the preferred hotel companies for their business travelers, while Hertz was the most preferred car rental vendor, followed by Avis.