Survey Illustrates Scope Of Business Travel Recovery

A survey of business travelers jointly released today by three industry organizations highlights the extent of the corporate travel industry's recovery and its effect on corporate travel policies.

The study, released by the National Business Travel Association, the Institute of Business Travel Management and the Travel Industry Association of America, incorporated information collected through three consumer studies conducted by TIA. The studies include an online survey of 2,043 U.S. adults who reported taking at least one business trip between September 2003 and August 2004, an online survey of U.S. adults who reported taking at least one trip by air between September 2001 and August 2002; and a survey of 25,000 U.S. households collected by TravelScope, a monthly mailing managed by the TIA research department.

According to the report, nearly one in five U.S. adults traveled for business at least once in 2004 and U.S. business travel generated an estimated $153.2 billion, or 31 percent, of all domestic travel spending in 2003. More than one-quarter of business travelers reported traveling more between September 2003 and August 2004 than they had in prior 12 months, and U.S. domestic, individual business trips increased almost 4 percent during the first six months of 2004 as compared to the same period in 2003. As other recent surveys have indicated, business travelers expect to travel even more in 2005, as one in five respondents expressed that sentiment. On the management side, a recent NBTA survey reported that almost 75 percent of corporate travel managers expect an increase in their companies' travel volumes in first half of 2005.

Also telling of the industry's recovery trend are the NBTA, IBTM and TIA findings on corporate travel management and policies. While just 37 percent of traveler respondents indicated working in a managed environment, including travel management departments, off-site agencies, online booking tools and internet-based agencies, almost 73 percent said that their companies had in place one or more of 14 policies investigated in the survey. That number, while significant, actually represents a decrease in travelers who reported working under those policy requirements, from 79 percent in 2002. The report suggests that such decreases may be "coincident with general economic gains and with a departure from severe travel restrictions implemented by some companies after Sept. 11, 2001."

"We believe that U.S. business travel is finally in recovery and expect reasonably healthy growth over the next several years," said Suzanne Cook, senior vice president of research for TIA, in this morning's release. "During this time, U.S. companies will look for ways to maximize their effectiveness and minimize costs and will increasingly look to things like new technologies and smart travel management to do so."

Though travel management programs widely are considered to be growing more sophisticated, the perceived return to economically stable times among business travelers may be counteracting the kind of progress Cook predicts. In 2004, respondents indicated a decrease in use of travel-replacing technologies-teleconferencing, Webconferencing and videoconferencing-with 39 percent reporting use of such tools compared with 47 percent in 2002.

Still, reining in travel spend remains paramount in this period of economic recovery and, NBTA director and chief operating officer Bill Connors said this study helps prove the value of managed travel programs from both the cost-control and traveler-satisfaction perspectives. "The positive impact of travel management is really quantified here. If you look at the business travelers who responded to the survey who are under managed programs versus the ones who are under unmanaged programs, the business travelers who responded under managed programs are much more satisfied with their travel experience than those who aren't," he said. "This research refutes some of that negative anecdotal stuff about travel managers and says that people are happy with them and people are happy with companies that care about them."

Connors also considered noteworthy the fact that 62 percent of business travelers reported adding a leisure component to at least one of their business trips in 2004. "Not only is business travel a huge player in the overall travel industry-the survey indicates we represent about one-third of all the travel spend out there-but we're also impacting the leisure side in an interesting, new way," he said. "Obviously, the research that's come out of this has given us a whole lot of other questions that we'll be curious about."