As business travel regains momentum, opportunities could arise for companies that can offer tech solutions for evolving challenges.

Four notable themes are taking shape across today’s business travel landscape:

• Business travel—following an uncertain few years—appears at last to be on solid footing.
• The evolving marketplace for servicing unmanaged business travel (in which employees are given the freedom to book for themselves but have less company oversight and support) is creating new opportunities for tech solutions.
• Managed business travel (in which centralized corporate systems are used for booking, approval, and savings) is undergoing a wide-ranging digital transformation.
• The lines between business and leisure travel are continuing to blur.

Business travel is back

The headline numbers on business travel are excellent. The World Travel & Tourism Council recently released its projection that the global value pool for business travel in 2024 is about $1.5 trillion. That’s up by more than 6 percent compared with 2019. For context, $1.5 trillion is roughly equivalent to the GDP of Spain or Mexico.

In the United States, the 2024 value pool expectation is $472 billion, which is 13.4 percent ahead of 2019. We should note that these numbers have not been adjusted for inflation, which has been significant. Even so, these are projections that should offer optimism about the path that lies ahead.

Why is business travel recovering? The tech company Calendly, which makes software that helps automate booking for corporate meetings, recently surveyed 1,200 business leaders—across roles, departments, industries, generations, company sizes, and regions—and found that, remarkably, 81 percent of respondents said that holding more meetings would help them in some way. Digging into the underlying data in the report reveals the “why” behind this statistic: people have found that there is no substitute for face-to-face engagement with their leaders and colleagues. Employees craving in-person encounters bodes extremely well for business travel.

According to the 2025 Global Meetings and Events Forecast from American Express Global Business Travel (Amex GBT), 66 percent of meeting-planning professionals expect meeting spending to grow in the future. Meeting professionals also expect the majority of meetings next year to be in-person only, with an additional number of meetings affording a hybrid mix of virtual and in-person.

Full Story: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/travel-logistics-and-infrastructure/our-insights