• Business travel will look very different   

Excerpt from Computerworld

The way people travel for work in 2022 or 2023 will look a lot different than it did just a few years ago. So, grab a burner phone (and your freshly wiped laptop) before you go.

As the pandemic winds down and businesses start making plans for a post-pandemic world, the one big question is: How has business travel changed?

Recent trends that combine work with travel that are not necessarily business travel—workcations, “bleisure” travel—are changing business travel while also helping to keep the travel industry afloat as it awaits the return of full-scale business travel. And the bleisure trend is real. The American Hotel & Lodging Association’s 2022 State of the Hotel Industry Report found that 89% of global business travelers wanted to add a private holiday to their business trips over the next 12 months.

The “Great Untethering” trend means business-traveling employees are more likely to blend work, fun, and travel. And so business trips will more often be combined with workcation days, where employees have more fun on business trips and extend those trips for days combining work and tourism.

Home rentals (Airbnb and its competitors) will be favored over hotels more than before the pandemic. (Hotels will fight the trend by functioning as live-in coworking spaces with spacious rooms and super-fast internet connectivity.)

It’s likely that traveling for business to meet with clients won’t recover for a while but traveling for staff retreats may surge to higher levels than ever. After employees have been sheltering in place, working from home, and interacting with colleagues over Zoom, many business leaders are calling for in-person staff retreats in what some are calling the “Great Reconnection.” This trend should continue with larger percentages of people working from home. Anticipating the trend, there’s been a recent boom in retreat-planning startups like Troop and NextRetreat.

Not surprisingly, business travel security will challenge IT departments in the near future just as remote-work security does now. In the pre-pandemic days, it was common for any business traveler to just load up their normal work laptop and phone and head off to their destination.

That’s not how it works anymore. With legal changes to downloading data at airport security lines—and increasingly aggressive industrial espionage efforts globally—the use of wiped laptops and burner phones will be more common. We even saw this at the Olympics, where athletes and Olympic staff were urged to bring only burner phones. The so-called “burner phone Olympics” has nothing to do with the Olympics and, in fact, is just a new norm that international business travelers should, and will, adopt.

Click here to read complete article at Computerworld.