New Business Travel Trends in 2022

As worldwide vaccination levels increase, and Covid restrictions are gradually being lifted, our clients return to their business travel routine with a surge of individual and group travel bookings.

While booking numbers increase, and Q1 2022 figures already exceed 2019, we at Arbitrip identified a few interesting trends among our business travelers that we wanted to share with you.

 

Equipped for work

More organizations have shifted to hybrid work models, allowing employees to do work practically from any place on earth. Salesforce for example, launched Success from Anywhere, which offers their employees the flexibility to work from any location and at any convenient time for them.

This change allows more travelers to work while traveling around the world, and we can see the rise in demand for hotels that offer work-friendly rooms that are quiet, equipped with a more convenient work station, and stream fast and reliable Wi-Fi.

These travelers will also usually prefer hotels that have shared working spaces for the use of the hotel business guests. The Hoxton Chicago for example has a “Work-Stay-Play” package, which allows guests access to the facility’s in-house co-working space.

 

Tech and Modern

With the progress of technology accelerating rapidly, and rising number of corporate travelers from high-tech organizations, another characteristic of the new business traveler is to search for modern, futuristic, high-tech hotels.

Those travelers expect to have the most up-to-date technology in their hotel rooms. Extra USB sockets and docking stations are a thing of the past, when the new hotels now offer a variety of features from smart rooms, underwater speakers and mood-themed LED lights to signature-scented meeting rooms.

The room design in these increasingly popular hotels will usually be modern, clean and artsy. For example, you can have a look at a typical room design of the Copenhagen CitizenM, the trendy Netherlands-based boutique hotel chain, which has properties in cities like London, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

“Bleisure”

After 2 years of scarcely traveling the desire to enhance the experience during the business trip became ever more important. And so, it does not come as surprise that another trend is one that we have already started seeing pre-Covid, but is now picking up.

We are of course talking about the traveler’s desire to combine their business trip with a vacation – and create the perfect blend of business and leisure. There’s even a name for this trend – they call it “Bleisure”.
A standard “Bleisure” travel is usually comprised from a 3-4 day work trip, to which the traveler add a few vacation days at the beginning or the end.

For this type of trips, the travelers seek to stay in an extraordinary unique hotel, whether this is exhibited in the hotel design, its’ offered culinary experiences or its’ shared spaces and culture events concept.

Also, while booking these trips our travelers usually gave a much higher importance to the hotel location and its distance from the city center or popular attractions.

 

As we progress into Q2 2022 it seems that business travel is finally back to stay.
Live worldwide conferences are being scheduled, companies re-build new travel policies for 2022 and re-recruit for travel positions.
As stated by GBTA in Q4 2021, YOY increase of 38% is expected in 2022, with a further increase in 2023.

We will of course keep our eyes open for spotting new trends and share the latest news with you, so keep following for more.