Most airline conflicts in the Before Times though involved one passenger or one party traveling together and crew. They’d usually be removed from the aircraft, sometimes by law enforcement. You wouldn’t have very many situations devolve to where multiple groups of passengers are fighting with each other – as we’ve seen happen over the past year. The return of business travel is going to reverse that change.
business travel
Tag Archives for business travel.
The Case Against Post-Covid Business Travel. Will You Ever Fly Again The Way You Used To?
With more and more Americans testing positive for Covid-19, and with the first (Pfizer-BioNTech) vaccine already rolling out, we’re likely approaching the final stages of the pandemic. But are we all going to go right back to normal, how things were before?
Now that everyone uses Zoom remote work is better than it used to be. People coming into a meeting by video that’s happening in person used to be second class attendees For a large subset of white collar workers work from home simply works better.
Covid-19 Will Mean A Long-Term Drag On Business Travel, Even After A Widespread Vaccine
Videoconferencing has become more accepted as a technology. More people know how to do it. And peopled being ‘zoomed into a meeting’ are no longer the outsiders, only half in the meeting with people in a room.
In-office visits are hard to coordinate. They can’t return until people are back in the office, but all people aren’t going back to the office all the time. If there are a quarter fewer in-office days overall, that makes coordinating business meetings harder and there will be fewer business trips.
How Important Is Business Travel To The Airlines Anyway?
We know that business travel is almost non-existent these days, but airlines in the U.S. have consistently reported that it’s more or less tripled off of a very low basis – it was down 95% and now it’s down ‘only’ 85% (so up from 5% of last year’s levels to 15%).
The business travel that has recovered has been small businesses, often in the Midwest and Sun Belt, as well as critical logistics and health care businesses. But how much of an airline’s total revenue did this account for, anyway?
No, A Federal Mask Mandate Won’t Bring Back Business Travel
Kevin Mitchell of the Business Travel Coalition argues that a federal face mask mandate for airlines and airports is crucial to bringing back business travel. But a mask mandate is likely to mean less mask wearing because it’ll have more exemptions than current airline policy. And business travel isn’t being held up by insufficient masking on planes.
What Businesses Have Employees Flying Now?
Following the American Airlines third quarter earnings call on Thursday, senior executives held a ‘State of the Airline’ question and answer session with employees. One of the questions was about which businesses are traveling now?
American’s Chief Customer Officer Alison Taylor, who prior to this summer led sales for the airline, shared who their “largest customers at the moment” are.
American Airlines Says Business Travel Has Tripled Off Its Low Base, Led By Midwest Manufacturing
According to top American AIrlines executives there’s “a lot more consumer willingness to travel especially in the South and Midwest.” These are “small and medium-sized business[es]” in “cities that are smaller cities, Tulsa or Oklahoma City” rather than “places like New York or San Francisco which were the big meccas of large corporate travel.”
Consulting, financial services and entertainment aren’t traveling. Factory and warehouse businesses are.
Southwest’s CEO Says Business Travel Won’t Return For A Decade. He’s Wrong.
I’ve been overall a pessimist about business travel, but Southwest’s CEO takes it too far, arguing that he “wouldn’t be surprised to see business travel languish for a decade before it gets back to 2019 levels.”
Sure, he’s signaling that with their relatively strong balance sheet and largely domestic travel exposure they’re better-positioned than rivals to withstand a long travel recession. But we’re already starting to see cracks in the ‘indefinite work from home’ model.
9 Reasons Business Travel Won’t Be Back This Year
We’ve had four days in the past week where the TSA reports more than half a million people clearing airport security checkpoints. That’s down from 2.3 to 2.7 million a year ago, but way up from 87,000 a day at bottom.
That’s mostly led by domestic leisure travel. Business travel, on the other hand, is a long way off – and likely won’t return to anything near normal this year. Here are 9 reasons why.
With Business Travel Cratered, Extra Money Faking Expense Reports Dries Up Too
Not only has business travel ground to a halt, but as a result employee expense reimbursements have too.
In normal times expense reimbursements are one of the primary areas of fraud that companies face. Employees fake receipts. They change amounts on receipts. They mis-describe personal purchases as being for business and submit those. They submit the same item more than once. Employees know which supervisors don’t look closely, and learn which companies don’t use sophisticated software to catch these tricks.