New norms for air travel

Yet another service cut from Air Canada hit the Atlantic provinces on Tuesday, as the airline dropped all service in Labrador and direct flights from St. John’s to Toronto.

And a growing question?

Will one anchor of the airline business ever come back?

For months now, businesses have had to pivot as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Executives who used to fly to visit regional offices of their businesses — sometimes simply for face time morale-building meetings with employees — have moved to video messaging. Team meetings at all levels have moved from the conference room to the conference Zoom, often with team members dialling in from home, complete with pet appearances.

Microphone-on-mute when you’re not talking conference etiquette has become standard fare.

Travel to conventions and trade shows?

Full stop there as well, though some analysts have predicted a relatively fast recovery, post-pandemic.

It’s been a different way of working. And it’s also been a savings. But business travel is a full-fare backbone for airlines.

A certain volume of full-fare tickets gives airlines the ability to offer cheaper seats to others to fill their planes — and, in the process, lowers the price of travel.

But companies that have discovered considerable savings from reduced corporate travel may well decide to build that savings into their future budgets. There will still be reasons for essential business travel — bringing in company IT specialists, for example, to wholly retool a branch office’s computer systems — but by the time the pandemic is under control, video conferencing may be a comfortable enough approach for all players to eschew the cramped travel and the endless nearidentical hotel suites of the business road trip. How big could the change be?

Well, in November, Bill Gates told the Dealbook conference, “My prediction would be that over 50 per cent of business travel and over 30 per cent of days in the office will go away.”

Part of that, Gates points out, is because of a change in the expectations from clients.

“Now that it’s not the gold standard to say ‘Yes, you flew all the way over to sit in front of me,’ and that you can do the virtual connection, it will be a very high threshold for actually doing that actual business trip,” Gates said.

Microsoft’s internal director of travel, Eric Bailey, was even more blunt: “The inherent way we do business is changed forever.”

The savings involved can be staggeringly high: financial officials with Amazon revealed that company saved almost US$1 billion during the pandemic as a result of reduced travel in 2020 alone.

Of course, that’s not just airlines: it’s hotels, restaurants, taxis and the list goes on.

And if the rules of business travel are redrawn, a lot of other corporate rethinking is going to have to happen, too.