Your Attention, Please: What’s the Future of Business Travel?

Now’s the time to consider when hitting the road will make sense in the years ahead. (If ever.)

The golden age of business travel, replete with first-class flights, high-end hotels and fat expense accounts, feels like a bygone era to the modern worker. Yet even in its more modest contemporary form, work-related trips have remained common enough to be a reliable source of cash flow for airlines and hotels. Or had, until they halted completely.

Year one of the pandemic caused a chilling freeze on both business travel and its trusty companion, the in-person meeting. Then last spring, as case numbers started to improve, airlines began increasing flights again. They were happy to accommodate a surge of pent-up leisure demand — and perhaps more urgently, recoup the business bookings that accounted for roughly 15% of their tickets but nearly half their revenue.

Those of us choosing to revisit the office, however gingerly, relished the return of meeting in person. The first such gathering was, for this writer, an unexpectedly emotional experience — rare for a stoic midwesterner. Yet given the hybrid state of both our workforce and clientele, most meetings ended up a combination of live humans around a table and disembodied heads that…