Corporate leaders are bullish about the return of at least some business travel over the coming years, and nearly half even expect travel to spring back to greater than pre-pandemic levels, according to a new AirPlus International survey.
The Lufthansa-owned corporate payments provider in June polled 743 corporate board members and executives in its home country of Germany, as well as the U.S., U.K., China, Italy and France, about their organizations' plans for resuming travel after the Covid-19 pandemic.
The results indicate that travel for meetings with customers and suppliers likely will remain a priority post-pandemic, while travel for internal company meetings has been de-emphasized.
Eighty percent of survey respondents expressed a belief that personal contact with outside parties, such as customers and suppliers, remains essential for corporate operations—a percentage unchanged from the previous AirPlus survey, which was conducted prior to the global Covid outbreak in November 2019.
What's more, 48 percent of respondents in the most recent survey projected their company's travel activity over the next two to three years would rebound to a level even greater than 2019, with 79 percent of those respondents citing the importance of personal dialogue with clients and suppliers as a driver of that travel resurgence.
Meanwhile, 31 percent of respondents forecast travel within two or three years to return to at least the same level it was pre-pandemic, the study found, while only 20 percent believed travel activity over that period would remain lower than 2019 levels. Among those who expect less travel, about three-quarters cited improvements in such technical capabilities as videoconferencing to replace in-person meetings.
The majority of those meetings replaced by videoconferencing likely will be internal company meetings, according to the survey. Just 73 percent of corporate decision makers surveyed said in-person meetings were essential, six percentage points lower than the pre-pandemic poll.
Along with the poll results, AirPlus released payment data showing a significant uptick in business travel in recent months. Europe-based AirPlus customers took one-third more flights in May than they did in April, and nearly five times more trips than in May 2020, the company reported.