The State of Corporate Travel and Spending in 2022

In this report:

Results from a survey of more than 1,100 corporate travel and spending decision makers and more than 500 business travelers exploring changing attitudes toward corporate travel and spending.
An overview of the growing importance of corporate travel and expense management in company decision making.
An exploration of how the shift to remote work will impact corporate travel habits and spending.
An exploration of how business travel organizations and platforms are improving their employee support and health and safety functions.
In-depth interviews with corporate travel managers, meeting and event directors, and top business travel leaders on how the industry is evolving.

The past 18 months have had a profound impact on the corporate travel industry, with rapid changes occurring in areas such as the future of the office and work culture, evolving corporate travel policies, employee safety, and a general refocus on post-business travel planning and programming. pandemic environment. But as 2021 comes to a close, corporate travel and spending are seeing a significant rebound. So while there are still reasons for uncertainty, there are also many signs of optimism as the industry looks ahead to 2022.

One of the main areas of interest is how quickly business travel will return. Domestic travel to the U.S. surged in the summer of 2021, with travelers returning to major urban centers they had avoided at the height of the pandemic. Benchmarking data from TripActions shows that summer 2020 sales grew across the board in 20 major U.S. cities, led by Las Vegas and New York, by 519 percent and 471 percent, respectively, compared to summer 2020. Assuming this trend continues, domestic travel will continue. Business travel is expected to lag behind the leisure segment, but is projected to catch up at the same pace.

Another area of evolution involves the products and services offered by corporate travel and spending platforms, which must continue to adapt to the changing needs of corporate travelers. This includes a growing focus on employee safety, as well as new topics such as better employee expense management and overall company expense management.

Amid all this, companies are bringing workers back to the office—and even industries like banking and finance are demanding their return—while other industries are navigating a future of remote work and team travel. And in popular destinations like Las Vegas, large-scale meetings, conventions and live events are once again picking up steam.

How these developments will impact business travel remains to be determined. However, early data from the industry suggests that the impact of remote working on employee travel is not an all-or-nothing proposition. Some business travel may decline, while other new forms of work travel, such as off-site trips and team meetings, may increase in frequency.

This latest report from Skift and TripActions includes survey-based feedback on all of these topics from more than 1,100 finance and corporate travel and expense managers worldwide, as well as more than 500 business travelers, as well as insights from industry leaders. And he believes the overall improvement in forecasts compared to last year is consistent with the developments noted above.

Of course, the environment remains dynamic as markets and economies contend with the spread of coronavirus variants in the U.S. and abroad. The lack of universal access to vaccines, exacerbated by a variety of different government policies and travel restrictions, also poses a near-term challenge to the global recovery.

However, despite these challenging situations, new technologies and innovations born during the pandemic will help ease the challenges while setting corporate travel on a reimagined and renewed course for the future. In every crisis lies the seeds of opportunity; and, as with any departure from the status quo, new assumptions and paradigms point to some positives for business travel.