Returning to travel? Yes, but under new conditions
Italian business travelers want to return to travel, but they also want new and more advantageous conditions to better manage the [...]
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Italian business travelers want to return to travel, but also want new and more advantageous conditions to better manage their work after the difficult period of the pandemic.
This is the finding of a recent study conducted by SAP Concur, a well-known U.S.-based company based in Washington and specializes in providing travel and expense management services to businesses. The report was conducted globally and found that almost all (95%) business travelers intend to Return to business travel as early as next year.
The reasons are easy to understand: the long stop to business flights due to the coronavirus is likely to exacerbate the economic crisis in the industry, hurting business travelers both personally and professionally. Major concerns revolve around the fear of not being able to maintaining business relations and to suffer economic as well as career damage. But there also emerges a discreet awareness that this situation has negatively affected the ability of companies to enter into new agreements.
While this is a fairly obvious fact, much more interesting is the statistic regarding the demand for new conditions with which to do one's work, and it sees just Italy in a particularly relevant position. In fact, if the overall figure of the business traveler who seek greater autonomy, is around 68%, in our country it even rises to 81%: the highest percentage among all the markets covered by the study.
What Italian business travelers demand
'Flexibility' is the new buzzword, with about 2 out of 3 travelers considering it a key factor as business travel resumes. Specifically, Italian business travelers are asking their companies for a greater autonomy In the choice of accommodations and travel arrangements.
More than a third of respondents would like to be able to make their reservations directly through the websites of the airlines they plan to use or the hotels where they plan to stay. In particular, interest prevails in the organization of more convenient travel, given also the recent pandemic situation and health risks: reducing the length of routes or the option of trips limited to the national territory, so as to avoid stopovers, are among the requests that find the greatest consensus.
Although many business travelers today feel more responsible for their own health than in the past (the percentage is 41%), there is still a high expectation that the employer will commit to Protect health and safety Of its employees.
A responsibility, this one, that will obviously fall on those who have to organize travel. We are talking about travel managers, who are called upon to strike the right balance between the interest of the company and that of the employee who has to travel for work. Virtually all of the travel managers involved in the study (the 99%) believe that their job will prove to be much more challenging in the coming year compared with the past 12 months.
Prevailing among the latter is the certainty that the following will be implemented new company policies, and in addition, several travel managers (estimates, in this case, range from 50% to 60%) believe that the most sensitive issues to manage in the coming period will involve communication, last-minute changes or cancellations related to reservations, and the need to keep up with updates in state regulations.
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