The Next Phase of Business Travel Is Definitely Not One-Size-Fits-All

25.08.2023 - 13:43 / skift.com / Matthew Parsons

You may have noticed the status quo has all but returned.

For several months now the corporate travel sector has been preoccupied with pre-pandemic favorites like booking channels, sustainability and simply getting back out there.

It’s a welcome change from pre-departure Covid tests and mask mandates. While the pandemic has faded, the concept of remote work hasn’t. It’s morphed significantly since the start of the year. At first it was compulsory; now it’s a lot more fluid in nature.

Skfit’s Future of Work Briefing has chartered its evolution for more than two years. We’ve examined how household travel names adjusted to new types of travelers; how governments and their economies reacted to the growing numbers of digital nomads; how travel entrepreneurs created new businesses to respond to their new needs.

The conclusion? Every business has been impacted in some way.

Take Skift for example. Early on in the pandemic we permanently closed our global office network and dived into the world of virtual work.

From a personal perspective, working remotely opened up the door to relocate to a new country, France, creating multiple new sets of travel patterns, professionally and otherwise.

What has become apparent since the start of the year is that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to remote work. Organizations now take highly individual approaches and stances as they rev back up their business travel.

Managing remote work is important because during the pandemic remote work replaced business travel when it came to companies’ policies around work travel. That is no longer the case, though, and we’ve entered a two-track phase where remote work runs in parallel with a revitalized and revamped corporate travel universe.

Today some common themes are returning. Take the Global Business Travel Association’s latest poll: It  just quizzed almost 18,000 travel professionals for their views on airfare distribution.

Other big topics set to dominate the rest of this year include carbon emissions, with enormous pressures bearing down on companies to become greener. Then there’s identifying new business travel pathways, with China and India set to dominate. We’ll be hearing a lot more about artificial intelligence too. And in the U.S. the impact of the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure bill will be felt widely.

As the world starts to stabilize, and businesses find an equilibrium, this will be the last Future of Work Briefing from me as we bring corporate travel back into focus.

We’ll continue to look at remote work’s impact on both business travel and on destination management, but we’ll also be working hard to explain the current state of the new corporate travel landscape, and what that means to business travelers,