Business travel may never be the same again.
With programs or apps such as Slack and Zoom literally taking off (I had my first Zoom chat ever on Saturday, linking up eight family members in Toronto with five in California, including my 88-year-old father), how long will it take for businesses to decide that long-distance travel isn’t as necessary as it used to be?
There will always be a place for in-person meetings. But with webinars and virtual reality and Slack and Zoom and FaceTime and Skype and other services out there, folks are beginning to realize that we really CAN do a lot of our business in our pajamas, or maybe in a suit in front of a camera at home or the office.
As that realization spreads, what happens to business travel? Will big corporation still spend $5,000 to $10,000 to send their CEO to a meeting in Thailand or Berlin when the COVID-19 crisis eases, leaving them jet-lagged and exhausted, and leaving a potentially precarious company bank account in a further state of depletion?
I don’t think COVID-19 will destroy business travel by any means. It will be slow to recover, but it may be quite a while before it gets back to 2019 levels.
In a story posted on the Harvard Business School website, professor Gary P. Pisano said he thinks organizations “will learn that they can leverage technology much more effectively to operate remotely and conduct business. We will realize we need far fewer face-to-face meetings than we thought.”
Pisano said companies that will lose include airlines and hotels.
“We may discover we just don’t need to travel to meetings as much as we thought,” he said.
And that could be a big problem for airlines, and airline employees. The big carriers rely on expensive, front-of-the-plane seats to bring in big bucks. If you talk to airline operators, they’ll tell you that those sky-high business class fares are what allows them (some of them) to offer reasonable fares to the rest of us poor schleps in economy.
If business travel drops, say 10%, that would have a major impact on airlines’ cash flow. And that would make it quite difficult for them to offer cheap fares for the average Jane or Joe back in the coach section.
I suspect some airlines will be offering great deals as we begin to climb out of the crisis. But will those low fares be available again next year? Not if airlines lose a good deal of business class income, they won’t.
As Pisano points out, hotels also would suffer; especially the big business properties in bigger cities. Mom and Pop places in resort areas might be fine, but sleek business hotels could take a hit.
And what about big conventions? Cities like Toronto already have lost major convention sessions. I can imagine an awful lot of people wanting to avoid gathering with hundreds or even thousands of other people in a confined space; something most of us didn’t give a second thought to as recently as two months ago.
I read a story in the New York Post today that said travel will rebound and be better than ever, with more thoughtful travel and more local travel. I’m pretty sure the latter will certainly be the case, and I expect a pretty good year for Canadians exploring their own back yard.
In some ways, travel could be better in the future. But in other ways, such as business travel, things may never be the same.
