‘Team building’ is driving the recovery of business travel

AMEX global business travel data shows the sector is back to 72 per cent of its pre-Covid levels.

Rebuilding company culture is one of the key drivers of the business travel recovery.

Rebuilding company culture shattered by two years of working from home has emerged as one of the main drivers of the business travel recovery.

American Express global business travel data shows the sector is back to 72 per cent of pre-Covid levels. Domestic is stronger than international business travel, and small and medium enterprises are filling more airline seats than big corporations.

AMEX GBT chief commercial officer Andrew Crawley said the areas showing the strongest recovery were in sales – people going to meet prospective new clients – and organised gatherings of up to 50 people.

Larger conventions were yet to fully recover, as was travelling to see existing clients, while “internal meetings” were starting to gain momentum but not in the way they expected.

“In the past, internal meetings were used for quarterly updates with teams throughout the world, and now that’s pivoted to something very different, which is linked to the work-from-home phenomenon,” Mr Crawley said.

“What companies have realised is that generating culture around the company, the employee value proposition so to speak, is very difficult through a screen.”

As a result, some companies were going to quite extraordinary lengths to become reacquainted with workers – many of whom had only been recruited in the past couple of years.

“We’re seeing internal meetings used for culture creation, networking and new hires,” Mr Crawley said.

“We’ve got one customer who’s building ranches across the US to ship people to when they’re first employed, so they can be introduced to the company culture, do some networking.

“They’ll be used for wellness as well.”

The sectors experiencing the strongest rebound in business travel were farming, healthcare, government, energy and mining while the slowest to recover was technology.

Mr Crawley said that in the middle was banking and finance as larger multinational corporations were generally taking longer to reconstruct travel policies than small and medium enterprises.

Soaring airfares were looming as a potential speed bump to the recovery and the high prices were likely to mean fewer trips for many companies, Mr Crawley said.

“What customers are saying about airfares is that they are exorbitant,” he said. “That, I think, will mean they’ll probably keep their budgets the same, which may result in fewer transactions.”

The adoption of “carbon budgets” by some companies posed another hurdle for the business-travel recovery, with the race to net zero carbon emissions by 2050 now well and truly under way.

AMEX GBT was jumping on board the sustainability drive with the development of a platform where customers could potentially buy sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) for employees’ flights.

The only problem was the very limited supply of SAF and the expense.

“It’s much spoken about but that’s the problem. It’s not ­really produced at scale at the moment,” Mr Crawley said.

That was not stopping the development of “green solutions” to the issue of carbon emissions and Mr Crawley said they would push on regardless.

“Where we hope to get to is to link in SAF to the travel booking process so you can purchase that at the point of sale,” he said.

“It’ll probably be a few years down the line because it requires SAF to be manufactured, but we think that will happen over time.”