November 16, 2023 | By Nicole Radil and Lydie Charpin
The most accurate predictions are usually the most malleable. Take the contrasting Covid-era predictions that business travel, or corporate travel, would or would not fully recover.
Somehow both predictions were right. And travel & expense (T&E), also known as travel & entertainment, managers need to understand why.
The latest figures anticipate T&E spending to recover its 2019 height of $1.4 trillion sometime in 2024 and reach $1.8 trillion in 2027.1 In that sense, business travel is well on the way to a full recovery.
Yet travel spending is not the same as travel frequency or travel volume. While the number of business trips is increasing, business travel spending is increasing faster.2
People are traveling for longer periods than before. Far-flung daytrips or overnight meetings are out. Multiple meetings within a region, perhaps interspersed with an extended period of work away from home, are in.
One can hardly speak of a resurrection in business travel when trips and spending are out of sync relative to 2019. As digital transformation grapples with new hybrid workforces and rising environmental concerns, a more appropriate word is reincarnation.
So, when 87% of travel decision makers in a Mastercard-sponsored survey agree that business travel is at a tipping point with an opportunity to overhaul legacy systems, managers of T&E programs can no longer operate as if it is 2019 again.3
Here are four ways they can keep up.