Business Travel Could Stage a Full Pandemic Recovery in 2024

14.03.2024 - 18:59 / skift.com / Glen Hauenstein / Paul Abbott / Airlines

Business travel has lagged leisure throughout the pandemic recovery as corporate road warriors – and their finance chiefs – grew content with video calls and sporadic trips into offices. 

There are signs, however, that U.S. business travelers are making their way back, albeit at a very measured pace. West Coast technology companies — long the laggards in business travel  — are also returning. 

Business travel will regain 95% of its 2019 level in 2024, up from 89% last year, the U.S. Travel Association forecast in January. However, if the U.S. economy achieves a so-called “soft landing,” with inflation slowing and interest rates easing, large tech and financial services companies may send more people out on the road.

Speaking Tuesday at an investor conference, Alaska and Delta Air Lines executives specifically cited growing travel demand by Fortune 500 member companies. The airline industry has relied heavily on leisure traffic for the past four years. Today, global business travelers are becoming a nice bonus.

“What’s really been helpful is the return of business and corporate traffic for us in our West Coast hubs,” Alaska Airlines CEO Ben Minicucci said at the J.P. Morgan Industrials Conference. “We kept saying on every analyst call there’s upside for us, there’s dry powder, as it starts coming back. And that’s what we’re seeing. We’re seeing more business traffic come back.”

Travel volume by Amazon has surpassed its 2019 level, and Microsoft spending is twice the level of 2023, Minicucci said. Seattle-based Alaska has travel programs with both Washington-based tech companies.

At the same investor event, Delta also called out growth among business, and said it sees robust demand into the second quarter and summer. Delta President Glen Hauenstein cited “continued strength in premium products and growing demand for corporate travel, and the more traditional corporate travel, the Fortune 500 companies,” underlying the carrier’s financial optimism.

In January, Hauenstein had said that “nearly 95%” of those queried in Delta’s most recent corporate survey said they expected to travel as much or more in the first quarter as in the fourth quarter, “a double-digit improvement in travel intentions from our last survey.”

American Express Global Business Travel has detected a travel uptick among large global multinationals. 

“We’ve also seen a pickup, particularly in the tech sector and professional services and I think we will see a narrowing of the gap, if you like, between SME (small-to-medium-sized enterprise) and global multinational as we go through 2024,” CEO Paul Abbott said on the company’s March 5 earnings call.

AmEx GBT is forecasting sales to increase by as much as 9% this year. The company acquired