• Why Traditional Business Travel Is Dead   

Excerpt from View From The Wing

The return of business travel has been greatly exaggerated. And it's not just that zoom calls work for many meetings that used to be in person, or that people got used to them. The biggest driver of the drag in business travel is work from home. 'Return to office' isn't changing this.

  • Most airline executives report that business travel has returned to 75% – 80% of pre-pandemic levels.
  • But this exaggerates how much of business travel is back, because it’s relative to 2019 and not to the trend that was in place at that time. 2023 is far more than 20% – 25% below trend.

When people aren’t in their office every day that makes it tough to coordinate visiting clients in their offices. It happens, but it is more involved. You need to be there when the right group of people are there and there’s less chance they overlap compared to the past.

More importantly, a huge component of managed corporate travel was the road warrior consultant doing Monday to Thursday fly outs to work on-site at client offices. That is largely gone. When the client doesn’t have everyone in office every day, the consultant doesn’t need to be in-office.

Crucially here is what has happened not to the number of companies working from office, but to the number of work days – even people with office jobs aren’t working from office every day.

  • There’s more than 3 times as much work from home compared to before the pandemic
  • This hasn’t changed much in the last 3 years

Click here to read complete article at View From The Wing.