Dublin_rfk

A lot of brick and mortar businesses including airlines are going to take a hit and many won't recover. The United States economy runs on a service industry and we are discovering that running to an office or store for work has been replaced by work from home or smaller numbers due to duplication of efforts in multiple locations. There is a much smaller number of 'hard' services that require F2F interactions and vacation travelers that will continue to travel. If you believe that the airline industry is shaky look at the hotel industry. There are by my estimate 100X hotels in the US than there was when I started my career 40+ years ago they won't all survive.

Often1

Most analysts do not see business travel returning for 36-48 months. Luxury travel is expected to return sooner, but that will not be at deep-discount fares or through freebie upgrades.

There will always be some meetings which require travel, but people who used to hop on a plane will think twice or more likely, their CFO will think twice about the cost of airfare and associated hotels & car services + time, vs. Zoom. Indeed, seeing a client in their office may be a thing of the past because there is no office or, if there is one, it is a service center with a few IT repair stations at some suburban location.

9/11 is a poor comparison because the state of high-quality accessible video was not what it is today. People made do at the time. Now, they are a mouse-click away from their meeting.

SF1K

I’ve thought about this a lot as well. Yes obviously airlines can adjust the size of their premium cabins to meet demand, but I’m hoping and does anyone else think that this will mean the pricing model for international premium will go more the way we’re they don’t count on corporate discounts so much? Kind of like domestic premium. Selfishly I’d love for international First/Business to become a much more reasonable premium over economy, especially since I hope to retire in about 6 years.

darthbimmer

I see business travel returning, though likely at a permanently lower level than pre-Covid19.

Some people in business regard travel as a matter of pure requirement, a thing whose business value is not questioned. But a lot of businesspeople look at travel from an ROI perspective: what's the return on investment for conducting/attending a meeting in person, with the all the cash- and time costs that entails, versus the ROI for doing it remotely? The investment for remote has always been cheap; and with Covid-19 forcing companies to adapt there's increasing awareness of what the return can be.

I've always thought about the ROI of travel vs. remote meetings, so I've been doing a good fraction of my meetings remotely for years. Being forced to do them all remotely now has actually made me more aware of the limits of remote meetings. From the perspective of my job in technical sales I see that 1) it's taking 2-3x as many meetings to move deals forward as before, 2) deals are taking longer to mature (though budget constraints are also a factor in that), and 3) our chances of success are riskier because we simply can't get to know our customers and their needs as well via teleconference. Once it's safe to travel (and businesses reopen to having vendors come onsite) I'll definitely go back to conducting higher-value meetings f2f.

PV_Premier

The president of our division has "publicly" (internally) sort of announced his first international business trip since March, he will be going to Europe in October (if government travel restrictions allow, of course).

As an everyday "peon", I guess I am not getting on an airplane for business until there is a widely available vaccine or therapeutic.

Business travel will come back, we find that while it is easy to keep existing projects going forward under virtual environment, starting new things effectively and efficiently is harder. I expect my travel post CV19 will be about 50% of what it was before...check in and project maintenance trips will go away, but starting new things will still probably justify in-person site visits or sit downs.

whlinder

Similarly, I’ve wondered about the future of large conferences. SXSW, CES, whatever it may be, but those things seem like they can’t be the same remotely.

Error 601

I don't perceive a tremendous amount of enthusiasm for travel at the moment but all sorts of things have evaded a swift resolution because we can't just put somebody on a plane to go fix something. Once travel returns to something resembling normal we're going to have a lot of work to do at customer sites.

My hope was this situation would impress upon our customers that as much as we like taking their money they need to more more self-sufficient but that isn't what has transpired.

scottinaz

My company severely reduced business travel several years ago and has largely used videoconference meetings. However when we need to talk to a new customer or a new customer representative we largely choose in person meetings. An interpersonal relationship is much easier to develop in person than over a computer link. I think a lot of companies will slowly recognize this fact also but the pace of business travel will be severely reduced as more normal updates and conversations take place over the computer.

ctporter

I think most people agree that travel will not resume to the levels it has been, but I do believe there will be more travel in our future than we currently have. So far, I've only had one in-person meeting (speaker at an educational seminar with 100+ people) since February, and all the others meetings through November have been cancelled. Trying to reach the same level of interaction on standards is very difficult online. The interaction is not there, one person ends up spouting out info and has no way to gauge the comprehension of the audience. A different part of my job still requires travel but it is no where near as enjoyable as it used to be as all would agree that are still flying. . Flying is QUIET now, due to mostly empty planes, (have you noticed that?) no chatting with seat mates, almost no service (food and drink), fairly empty airports, and depending on the state, only deliveries (Door Dash, UberEats, etc) for meals instead of restaurants whether or not the hotel had a restaurant. Common sight now to see people waiting in the lobby of a hotel, peering at their phone to track where the status of their food delivery. My routine now for any travel is to check to see what the Covid restrictions are for where I will be staying, where as it used to be looking for decent restaurants to walk or that involved a short drive away. Ive also had to change destination airports in the Bay Area due to timing and availability of flights.

Redhead

Many of my coworkers are itching to get back in front of clients. I have a couple that I'd like to see in person since I know I can get more done that way but other clients I will happily continue to service remotely. But I don't see myself on a plane until a vaccine is widely available

pinniped

I know at our company, we are dearly missing the opportunity to get together periodically for face-to-face meetings. Typically about once every 8 weeks, we get a core leadership team together for 3 days and get a ton of strategy, planning, architecture, etc. work done. A lot of great thinking and innovation comes from those sessions, plus there's the side benefit of getting to know each other as a team. This year, their absence has been notable. We're still a collection of lone wolves getting things done on Teams calls, but the sense of "team" is greatly diminished and we are not really thinking about anything strategic...just soldier on until the vaccine and then we can think about the future.

Our company never asks me to jump on a flight with zero notice and fly somewhere for a 1 hour meeting. Companies that do that will hopefully not go back to it. But nothing replaces the ability to get people together to work as a team. That's where we can actually have the hard discussions and work on the tough problems in a way that *only* doing it as an individual can't be done.

chrisl137

I've never been asked to jump on a plane with no notice for a 1 hour meeting, but I have been asked to fly across the country on no notice to supervise/run a test on some hardware when the test campaign it was part of was running ahead of schedule. I've had quite a few of those with a few days notice, and we have a good number of people who need to fly regularly on 1-2 days notice to inspect various stages of fabrication of things. We're dealing with not flying, but in the long run it's not workable for building custom hardware.

I also regularly deal with vendors where I need to see facilities and/or IP that they're generally willing to show, but not electronically and a lot of it doesn't leave their buildings. Since I haven't started anything new since March it hasn't been a problem, but again, in the long run it's not likely to be workable.

I've been flying for personal reasons throughout the pandemic and have the process of keeping a clean bubble around myself worked out pretty well, though I also am not having to stay in hotels or deal with restaurants for my personal travel.

lhrsfo

To put a contrary thought, the lack of travel currently allows far more business to be done remotely, and I think we all agree that a proportion of that will always need to be done face to face. The greater efficiency and lower costs of doing business far from home should significantly expand that market (it's cheaper to sell your goods far from base, it's cheaper to manage your remote supply chains, whatever). This lower cost will drive more business to be done that way so, while the proportion of business done F2F will be down, the actual amount may well increase over time.

MiamiAirport Formerly NY George

Business travel will be forever changed. This was a trend that was sped up by COVID 19. While not all business travel will disappear more will be done by video. I see companies going this way full force even for activities that should be in person. At some point there may be some pull back from video but we will never, ever see the heydays of business travel. The cost savings for all parties is just too great to ignore, even if it reduces outcomes.

If this is the future the legacy airlines will need to adapt. Smaller premium cabins, more fees, more seats in Y, etc.

Super Mario

Pretty much what I came in to say. The future of business travel has changed forever. Travel will still happen, especially for the executives. For many others, you can save millions by having a virtual meeting, even if just some meetings are replaced. When you factor in downtime, flights, hotels, meals, etc how do you REALLY justify that the in person is worth that much more?