Restarting business travel post-pandemic wasn’t a
straightforward exercise in 2022. Pent up leisure travel had rocketed out of
the gate spiking prices for airfares and hotels. According to the U.S. Bureau
of Transportation Statistics, U.S. domestic airfares hit their post-pandemic
height in 2022 at about $415 on average for Q2, Q3 and Q4 after falling to pandemic-era
lows of under $300. Hotels were way up as well. Average daily rates were more
than $148, up more than 13 percent over previous record highs in 2019 and up
more than 43 percent from pandemic lows.
Rising
prices also were attached to labor shortages across airlines, hotels,
travel management companies, restaurants and more. Associated with that were rising
wages that pushed costs and pricing up. Inflation—especially with food and fuel—was
reducing margins. Travel customers of all stripes bore the brunt of some of
those costs.
For managed travel, in particular, dissatisfaction
with travel management company partners was on the rise. TMCs had been
gutted in terms of travel agent staffing, and it was not easy to win those
employees back. Many had retired or moved to other industries. Adding to the
difficulty in revving up agency engines was the fact that travel remained very
complex in 2022, with one TMC industry leader estimating that 40 percent of itineraries
required agent service in some respect as compared to 10 percent prior to the
pandemic. Frustration levels were high on both sides, with agencies eking out
margin on depressed volume with increased servicing requirements.
Indeed, corporates that had survived (and sometimes thrived)
with drastically reduced business travel seemed hesitant to head full force
back into the expense of travel. Suppliers remarked consistently in earnings
reports on the lagging recovery of transient business travel from large
corporates. Accor CEO Sebastien Bazin predicted international business travel
would remain 20
percent reduced forever—he later publicly acknowledged that prediction was
shortsighted. (The omicron
variant swept across the globe in January and February put
an additional damper on optimism for robust winter business travel.) But there
were a couple of rising stars in that commentary as well, becoming especially
apparent by the second quarter:
Groups & meetings—Companies couldn’t get enough
of getting their people together in 2022. They concentrated on smaller events
after Zoom fatigue and other impacts of an extended period of remote work had
turned into feelings of worker isolation, collaboration gaps and, in many
cases, loss of loyalty to the organization.
In addition to reimplementing traditional meetings, companies
had become well aware of the “Great Resignation,” which had been building since
March 2021 and was in full force in late 2021 and going into 2022. Businesses
were working hard to reinforce their cultures even as many workers continued to
demand the convenience of remote work from day to day. Getting teams and some
larger corporate groups together at offsites created opportunities to reinforce
corporate bonds through shared experiences. Meeting space and other offsite
event spaces were in high demand, but companies still felt the sting of
meetings cancellations from Covid. The result was drastically shortened
planning times combined with market compression. That,
of course, led to higher prices.
It should also be noted that while the idea of ‘hybrid’
events remained top of mind for companies and travel managers, the shine was
coming off the concept as companies realized how expensive hybrid events could
be. Planners reported it was like organizing two separate events. Technologies
like Hopin—which had reached Unicorn status in the depths of the travel
downturn—began
losing value and laying off workers as an industry thirsty for in-person
human interaction pushed for real face-time.
Small & Midsize Enterprise Business Travel—While large
enterprises overall were holding back on traveling at 2019 volumes, the small
and midsize business sector was leaning into full travel mode. Hotels and
airlines alike reported the return of the SME sector to business travel en
masse and many travel suppliers shifted their business travel focus to that
sector, which in large part was—and still is—unmanaged. Travel management companies—including
the megas—began making concerted
moves to attract and serve that market as well. Loyalty programs were at
the center of those efforts as travel suppliers looked to woo travelers
themselves. Give it another year, and you’ll see new SME-focused business
programs roll out from a number of major suppliers.
American Express Global Business Travel completed its
acquisition of Egencia in November 2021 and through 2022 began reformulating
its strategy around shifting
the growing SME segment to managed channels. CTM continued its SME acquisitions
in 2022, buying 1000 Mile, as specialist in the market, after taking over U.S.
midmarket specialist Travel & Transport in 2021. Both Travel Perk and Navan
(then still known as TripActions), whose business models had already attracted
primarily SME customers, were making major acquisitions. After acquiring Reed
& Mackay in 2021, Navan went on a European tour picking up TMCs in
Sweden and Germany
in 2022 and launched its ToGo
platform with Lufthansa. The TMC attracted a $300 million investment and
filed initial paperwork to public, but held back on the latter. TravelPerk,
after acquiring NexTravel and Click Travel in 2021, raised
another $115 million and increased its valuation to $1 billion.
Sustainability
In the industry push to return to full travel volumes, the
simultaneous rise of sustainability efforts in organizations across the gamut made
for an odd bedfellow. Travel suppliers—particularly airlines—were at the center
of the sustainability dialog and it’s hard to overstate the unprecedented number
of announcements coming from the travel industry in 2022 about their
sustainability efforts.
Hertz was among the most dramatic, investing in a huge
purchase of electric vehicles and pledging to support the development of a
cross-continent charging grid. The car rental company announced at the tail end
of 2021 that it had made a deal to buy 100,000 Telsas to add to its fleet. It would
take that delivery over time, and by 2024 EVs would make up 20 percent of its
fleet. The company said it would make a huge investment in the U.S. charging grid
as well. Within a couple of years, however, the deals would languish and Hertz would
announce fleet sell-offs for its EVs.
Airlines were pledging to buy sustainable aviation fuel at
outstanding rates; they were investing in refineries and working up schemes to
ensure corporate clients were able to buy into shared purchases. On the other hand,
companies like Shell, Accenture and Amex GBT were looking for ways to certify
and track those SAF purchases to ensure that purchases were credited to the buying
companies, but also by design aggregating corporate customer demand and allowing
airlines to access that demand in one place.
Indeed, TMCs made themselves central to the sustainability
efforts of their clients. In a depressed travel volume environment, focusing on
carbon emissions data, reporting and consultation was one way TMCs could
produce another revenue stream, but also clients were clamoring for the data. The
European Union spent 2022 passing the Corporate Sustainability Reporting
Directive, which eventually would require businesses of a certain size to offer
a numeric value for carbon emissions, specifically for business travel. As a
result, the industry reacted with a flurry of partnerships with the likes of
Thrust Carbon, Chooose and Squake for carbon calculation capabilities. How that
number might then inform programs that would reduce carbon emissions would be
the next step—some companies made huge strides toward mitigating carbon
emissions associated with travel. To date, those reductions have been tied to
reduced travel and/or changing travel modalities from air to rail, particularly
in Europe.
In the U.S., at least, the Biden Administration had baked
sustainability initiatives and incentives into both its Inflation Reduction Act
and its infrastructure bill that laid down foundational plans for an EV
charging grid, enhanced rail services and other large-scale projects as well as
incentives for states, businesses and individuals to make their own investments
to reduce climate change. Politically and practically, such moves became
untenable in the U.S. when Donald Trump was elected back into office and stopped
many of the initiatives that Biden put in motion—at which points corporations
themselves became quieter about what green initiatives they might be funding or
participating in. The EU, for its part, also pushed back the dates for
companies to begin reporting their carbon emissions.
Technology & Distribution
New Distribution Capability announcements continued to
trickle down the pike in 2022, but none were as breathtaking as American Airlines’
December announcement that it would remove
40 percent of its inventory from EDIFACT channels by April 1, 2023, and
that agencies would be required either to connect with the airline directly or
consume, display and enable purchasing via New Distribution Capability content
by that date or risk losing access to the content.
The response to the announcement varied from agency to
agency. For many, however, it meant taking their focus off improving call
center technologies and agent servicing levels and shifting those resources to
solving for a looming NDC cutover on April 1. The move engendered resentment
from agencies, and when American made good on its promise come April, the
industry response was negative overall.
Despite understanding American’s desire to reduce
distribution costs and increase control over retailing—and admitting that the
hardline stance would force the industry to advance—agencies were critical of
the carrier’s lack of specific guidance on its requirements for agencies to
retain their “preferred” status and what that status delivered. While many
agencies were able to offer booking for NDC content, most were unable to
service that content on the launch date. Buyers responded by pushing travelers
to other airlines, a move that ultimately would punish the carrier significantly
in terms of earnings. American in 2023 would make more changes to its approach
to corporate clients—many of which would not go well.
Also, in November 2022, openAI would launch ChatGPT. BTN did
not report on it at the time, but its availability and the launch of additional
large language model artificial intelligence would change the trajectory of
business travel’s future.
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For 2022, we’ve highlighted the industry’s
sustainability stories in our list below. A selection of additional stories are
hyperlinked in the narrative above.