Increased airline capacity and scheduling will be key for the industry to return to pre-pandemic travel volumes, according to the Advantage Travel Partnership.
The consortium has published the third edition of its Global Business Travel Review, looking at how the travel landscape has shaped up during July, August and September 2022, and the year to date.
Based on the report, Guy Snelgar, global business travel director of Advantage, predicted the industry will recovery to 74% of 2019 levels in 2022 and would not meet pre-pandemic levels for a full 12-month period until April 2024-May 2025.
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The report’s key findings were:
- For new transactions, April 2022 saw a 39% increase in booking traffic compared to the month before, and then tailed off by 11% in May. The flux has been stable since and missing is a return to traditional seasonality
- The average transaction value of 2022, year to date, is £333.32, 12% higher than in 2019
- Trip duration has exceeded 2019 averages: 2022 to date is sitting at 6.7 days, whereas 2019 yielded an average of 4.6 days
- Booking horizons in 2019 averaged 23.4 days, which has reduced to 21.1 days in 2022
“The data in the Global Business Travel Review 3.0 gives fascinating detail and context to the feedback we hear from Advantage members around the return to travel and the evolving behaviour of companies and their business travellers,” said Sneglar.
“Looking at the business travel industry over the past six months, it has been a story of recovery and growth, despite considerable ongoing disruption and capacity challenges.
“Based on our modelling, we predict that the industry will recover to 55% above 2020 figures, 82% above 2021 figures and 74% of 2019 figures.
“Whilst we are confident that travel demand will yield great volumes in 2023, an increase in airline capacity and scheduling will be key to the recovery of pre-pandemic numbers.
“With that in mind, we maintain our original forecast of full recovery to 2019 figures for a full 12 month period in April 2023-March 2025.”
Chris Lewis, founder and chief executive of Advantage’s data partner Travelogix, said: “Data is crucial to understanding the trajectory of recovery in the business travel industry.
“Whilst the summer demonstrated no real clear signs of standard seasonality, there were glimmers of a recovering industry that we cannot ignore, even when factoring in the UK’s economic woes, geopolitical unrest and, of course, the capacity and scheduling restrictions we are seeing in the aviation space.
“As an industry, we are around 25% away from reaching the transaction volumes we saw back in 2019 which shows just how far we have come.”
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