In Search of Corporate Travel’s Elusive Recovery
Skift Take
Most industry forecasts point to an eventual recovery — even to the 2019 high of $1.4 trillion in annual spending — as business trips start to bounce back. But many underlying trends are emerging in a fragile global economy. How we travel, and for what purpose, is far from certain as we enter a new era of accountability.
The one narrative for the post-pandemic travel rebound that largely remains in dispute now some two and a half years later, fueling prognostications from all sides, is the recovery of business travel.
Just as a flurry of new late summer forecasts for a full business recovery hit — again with no real consensus — a story was gaining a lot of attention that Google, once the giant of sending people out on the road in a Google-outsized kind of a way, was cutting back its travel budgets for what it called only "business critical" trips.
It was just another piece of evidence for business travel doubters that the industry will never be restored to its glory days. That's because after a challenging couple of years (and counting in some countries) the business travel industry has been looking back, misty-eyed, to the better times of 2019, asking: When will it be like that again?
More specifically it’s been looking back at the $1.4 trillion that was spent o