Does business travel have a future?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 27 April 2021
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Why fly when you can videoconference? After a year of Covid lockdowns, that's the question many business executives are asking themselves.
Manuela Saragosa speaks to one frequent flyer, Juliette Kayyem, who says that after a year of being grounded, she now thinks more about time with her kids, not to mention the carbon footprint of all her air miles. And she's not the only one - business travel consultant Scott Gillespie says corporate travel managers across the planet are now using the opportunity to reassess the financial and climate cost of their entire corporate travel policy.
So should the airlines and travel agencies be afraid? After all, business clients pay the fattest profit margins. We ask Jeffrey Goh, chief executive of the world's biggest airline grouping, the Star Alliance, plus Evan Konwiser of American Express' global business travel agency.
Producer: Laurence Knight
(Picture: A woman with a suitcase at the Madrid airport; Credit: Alejandro Martinez Velez/Europa Press via Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC with me, Manuel Zaragoza. |
| 0:06.5 | Coming up, the all-expenses paid business trip. Could it soon be extinct? |
| 0:11.5 | Senior management is clearly confounded. They have seen for the last year that they can do virtually |
| 0:18.2 | no business travel and many businesses have still succeeded. |
| 0:22.2 | We've all become used to virtual meetings amid COVID lockdowns, |
| 0:26.2 | but airlines depend on business travel for the bulk of their profits. |
| 0:30.2 | Obviously, we've seen what's something like 50, 60 airlines throughout the world folding, |
| 0:35.4 | but I think it's a little early to say which airlines are still going to be around |
| 0:40.3 | as the shakeout of the crisis comes around. |
| 0:42.7 | Will business travel ever return to pre-crisis levels? |
| 0:46.1 | That's all here in Business Daily from the BBC. My last work trip was in California. |
| 1:03.0 | I'm in Boston, so that's a good flight. |
| 1:05.0 | And then I would do maybe four to six foreign trips a year, depending. Some of those could be the long flight to Dubai. |
| 1:14.8 | You're on ground for a day and then you return. Before COVID hit, Juliet Cayenne there used to be a |
| 1:21.3 | frequent business traveler. Her job as a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government |
| 1:26.6 | and her previous position as former assistant secretary |
| 1:30.1 | at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security |
| 1:32.7 | meant she was in demand to speak at events around America and across the world. |
| 1:38.0 | Generally, I would try to get in the night before, |
| 1:42.0 | and I would take a single suitcase I never checked have my computer do emails |
| 1:47.4 | or read on flights arrive either a car picks me up or I get to the hotel so I tried to keep |
| 1:53.3 | everything down to one or two nights it was brutal on the system but it did mean that I was |
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