Business travel continues to increase and virtual meetings are losing dominance as a replacement for work-related travel, according to the Global Rescue Winter Traveler Sentiment and Safety Survey. It showed that the number of respondents traveling for business jumped 37% compared with survey results nearly a year ago. More than two-thirds (68%) of respondents said their business travel would be both international and domestic.
Dan Richards, CEO of The Global Rescue Companies, a provider of medical, security, evacuation and travel risk management services, said: “In-person meetings are more effective at establishing and maintaining relationships. It’s no surprise that work-related travel is rising.”
More than a fifth of business travelers (22%) reported work-related travel will exceed pre-pandemic levels in 2024, doubling the 11% reported in 2023. Early last year, 35% of business travelers said business travel would be “half or less than half” of pre-pandemic levels. Now, a year later, that percentage has dropped by a third, with only 23% of business travelers reporting that their work-related travel would be half or less than pre-pandemic levels.
Virtual meetings and videoconference calls are losing their dominance as a replacement for business travel, according to the survey. More than half (56%) of business travelers responding to the survey said virtual meetings and videoconferences are not replacing in-person business travel to a significant extent. “The days of traveling long distances for one meeting with one person could be gone forever, but people will travel for business at scale into perpetuity,” Richards said.
The biggest management challenge in this evolving environment, said Richards, will be how duty of care plays a role in protecting a business traveler and a location-independent workforce. Business leaders, he said, have to ask themselves if a set of rules or policies designed to maintain the health, safety and well-being of their employees is in place.
Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of business travelers surveyed (74%) say they do not have, or do not know if they have, a duty of care policy in place. The majority of the 26% of business travelers who say they have duty of care provisions in place reported the policy includes pre-trip planning, health alerts, on-trip event alerts, on-trip security or travel tracking.
Business leaders carry a duty of care responsibility to their employees, to take care of them and avoid exposing them to any unnecessary or undue risk, said Richards, adding that “as global work-related travel continues to increase, the more duty of care policies must evolve.”
