Reshaping the landscape: Corporate travel in 2022 and beyond [REPORT]

Travel is back—so say news stories and corporate earnings calls since the summer of 2021. There are caveats though, and they represent a large share of industry revenue. International travel still awaits an improved pandemic situation and less daunting border restrictions. Corporate travel remains below 50% of prepandemic spend and faces a more complex prognosis than leisure travel.

COVID-19 is still with us, and eradication seems unlikely. But officials and large organizations are moving away from some restrictions and requirements implemented earlier in the crisis. Hawaii ended its mask mandate on March 26, the final state to do so. Public school systems around the United States have also moved away from requiring masking.1 This spring and summer, many large companies will implement the return-to-office plans they delayed in the fall of 2021. An uptick in travel will likely accompany this shift to more office-based work.

Over the remainder of 2022, corporate travel should grow significantly from its now-small base. Team meetings that have been postponed multiple times will finally take place. More conferences will shift back from online to in-person, and those that already have will likely see attendance improve. Even international trips should grow significantly, although some regions will recover faster than others.

Many uncertainties still hover around the travel industry, from the trajectory of the war in Ukraine to the possibility of China reopening its borders, to the emergence of more COVID-19 variants. A major development in any one of these arenas could accelerate or impede corporate travel’s return. At the same time, the new shape and smaller size of corporate travel can be seen more clearly than a year ago, when Deloitte published its first look at corporate travel’s recovery, Return to a world transformed.2 As health concerns subside, companies will want to continue to bank some of the financial savings and environmentally friendly practices realized from two years of very limited travel. Corporate travel’s return has begun, but the conferencing technology that replaced nearly all of it beginning in early 2020 will likely continue to replace some of it for the foreseeable future.

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