Companies cancel business trips and keep their employees close to home as the Delta variant sinks.
September marks the start of the corporate travel season, but many companies are thinking of sending their workers on planes, mostly because they delay the return to work dates.
According to a report by the American Hotel & Lodging Association, which conducted a survey in August involving 400 business travelers, approximately 60% of business travelers said they would likely postpone their travel plans and 67 % made fewer trips.
Corporate travel returned about 40 percent of pre-pandemic levels this summer, according to Delta Airlines, which expected it to reach 60 percent in September.
“We won’t be at 60 percent,” Delta Airlines CEO Ed Bastian told The Wall Street Journal.
A Bloomberg survey of 45 large companies in the US, Europe and Asia shows that 84% plan to spend less on post-pandemic travel.
Business travelers are the most lucrative customers. They buy more expensive refundable tickets and account for up to three-quarters of airlines ’pre-pandemic profits, according to Bloomberg, while they account for only 12% of seats.
According to reports, airline executives have reported an increase in the number of cancellations and a slowdown in the number of new bookings.
The concern is a warning from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for unvaccinated people who give up travel during the Labor Day holiday weekend and that vaccinated people also consider the “risks” of their plans.
The European Union also recommended that its members limit non-essential travel from the United States, while Denmark and the Netherlands banned entry to Americans.
Among the companies limiting business travel is Dell Technologies, which in August sent a note to its employees explaining that domestic travel should be “critical” to the company’s business and customers and receive the approval from an employee’s manager and vice president, according to The Journal, while software company Citrix Systems told the publication that travel is still “very, very limited.”
Bastian, of Delta, argues that the trips will eventually recover. “There is no evidence that it disappears in any material way,” according to the report.