‘Team building’ driving business travel recovery post lockdown

REBUILDING company culture shattered by two years of working from home has emerged as one of the main drivers of the business travel recovery.

Data from AMEX global business travel shows the sector is back to 72 per cent of pre-covid levels, with domestic stronger than international business travel, and small and medium enterprises filling more airline seats than big corporations.

AMEX GBT chief commercial officer Andrew Crawley said the areas showing the strongest recovery were in sales and organised gatherings of up to 50 people.

Larger conventions were yet to fully recover, as was travelling to see existing clients, while “internal meetings” were starting to gain momentum but not in the way they expected.

“In the past, internal meetings were used for quarterly updates with teams throughout the world, and now that’s pivoted to something very different, which is linked to the workfrom-home phenomenon,” Mr Crawley said. “What companies have realised is that generating culture around the company, the employee value proposition so to speak, is very difficult through a screen.”

As a result, some companies were going to quite extraordinary lengths to become reacquainted with workers, many of whom had only been recruited in the last couple of years.

“We’re seeing internal meetings used for culture creation, networking and new hires,” said Mr Crawley. “We’ve got one customer who’s building ranches across the US to ship people to when they’re first employed, so they can be introduced to the company culture, do some networking. They’ll be used for wellness as well.”

The sectors seeing the strongest rebound in business travel were farming, health care, government, energy and mining, while the slowest to recover was technology.

Mr Crawley said in the middle was banking and finance, with larger multinational corporations generally taking longer to reconstruct travel policies than small and medium enterprises.

Soaring airfares were looming as a potential speed bump to the recovery, with the high prices likely to mean fewer trips, Mr Crawley said.

“What customers are saying about airfares is that they are exorbitant,” he said. “That I think will mean they’ll probably keep their budgets the same, which may result in fewer transactions.”