The future of business travel is seen as an especially important subject, with predictions about the industry’s evolution and impact on society. The pandemic in particular has brought a lot of attention to the importance of international travel for businesses.
The “how long do analysts predict the recovery period to last in reaching 2019 peak travel demand” is a question that comes up often. The answer is not yet known, but it is expected to be at least 2 years.
What We Can Say Now About Business Travel’s Future After the Pandemic
on February 27, 2022 by Gary Leff
This ad from United Airlines from 1990 explains why business travel would return in some form, and how a “phone call and a fax” can’t replace face-to-face meetings. Nonetheless, I stand by my prognosis that business travel would be irrevocably altered, which I made at the onset of the epidemic.
There will be excursions that used to happen but won’t anymore, trips that will happen but with fewer people, and trips that will happen won’t necessarily happen on the same days or for as long.
Fundamentally, being in person is preferable, and we’ll all want it. Although I don’t believe this is the conclusion of the narrative, Paul Graham’s framing is fantastic.
Imagine if face-to-face communication were a brand-new creation to discover out where we’ll find balance. What would early adopters do with this incredible new technology?
February 17, 2022 — Paul Graham (@paulg)
In-person collaboration requires coordination. People will gather with friends; but, they are significantly more inclined to go to restaurants (indoors!) than they are to return to their workplaces. Restaurants in New York City recently returned to roughly 75% of pre-pandemic levels, while workplaces were only about a quarter full.
Not everyone wants to return to work. And if they aren’t in the office, typical business travel, where you go visit someone at their office or bring a group of people to meet with a group of people in their office, is restricted.
- We’ve realized that Zoom isn’t quite as good as being there in person, but it’s a decent enough alternative for some of the travel and meetings we used to undertake.
- And some of the individuals who would travel aren’t as required to be in the room, and other people can remain at home now that we’ve invested in learning how to utilize technology and no longer see the person ‘calling in’ as just partly a participant (plus improved technology facilitates this).
- And, even if employees return to work, it may not be every day, how do you schedule those in-office meetings? Finding dates (coordination) becomes more difficult as a result.
- Plus, if your staff isn’t all in the office every week, your consultants don’t have to be either. When workers aren’t all in the office for the whole week, the usual Monday morning out, Thursday evening return week doesn’t make sense.
Large conferences will reappear, and in some respects, they may become even more crucial for bringing people together since they address a coordination challenge. (Meeting individuals at their offices is difficult, but you can catch up with them during the conference.) Though these conventions will take a long to go back to full strength since firms are hesitant to require return to the office and return to the road, so they will take a while to get back into the swing of things.
There will be more team-building trips in the future. Companies still feel the need to create culture and ‘get everyone on the same page’ even if they don’t work side by side all day in the office, thus you’ll see business retreats with employees who don’t work locally attending.
Coordination, above all, requires time. As businesses return to work, business travel will pick up again. As travel restrictions are lifted where they are still in place today, it will witness a rebound. You’ll want to go out there if you haven’t visited your plant in China in two or three years. However, after an initial surge, it will settle at a lower level and expand from there. And the patterns of who travels, why they travel, and how often they travel will be different than previously.
In person is unquestionably preferable, but the number of individuals who travel and how they organize their journey is changing. And, on balance, Zoom is a better alternative than it was before to the epidemic, which implies some trips will be rescheduled.
I’ll certainly continue to give speeches online that I would have given in person, despite the fact that in person is preferable. That’s because it takes 60-90 minutes instead of two days, including travel time and the risk of missing connections.
