When will businesses around the world reprise their pre-COVID levels of travel? According to estimates from the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) and shared by Bloomberg, global spending on commercial travel might not return to its pre-pandemic peak until 2025.
One article on the Business Travel News website goes even further, arguing that “business travel has peaked and … our industry will never return to its pre-COVID level”. So, could businesses that switched to online meetings during the pandemic start seeing them as the post-pandemic future?
A ‘trend’ that could be becoming permanent
There’s no doubt that, as lockdowns and travel bans were enforced across the world in 2020, commercial use of virtual events soared. One piece of evidence is the ON24 Webinar Benchmarks Report 2021 mentioned in a recent press release published by Business Wire.
This report focused on one of the most in-depth data analyses of virtual events and took into account over 2,000 organizations delivering, between them, more than 100,000 digital experiences each attracting at least 100 attendees.
The study’s findings included that, from January to December 2020, webinar usage on the webinar platform ON24 Webcast Elite increased by 162% – with attendance almost quadrupling to over 60 million people overall. Are such figures the shape of things to come?
Online vs. in-person meetings: where do the former have the advantage?
Many businesses would have originally seen their switch to online meetings as a temporary, ‘make-do’ arrangement in response to the pandemic circumstances. So, why aren’t businesses expected to quickly relinquish this supposedly makeshift approach as more of their workers get vaccinated?
There are several reasons why certain commentators have started sounding the death knell for in-person business meetings – or at least those that would require extensive travel. One of those reasons is that, quite simply, businesses haven’t found themselves losing as much as they might have first anticipated in the transition to online meetings.
Another reason is that, in forgoing meetings that would entail extensive travel, companies can not only save money but also trim their carbon footprint. Sustainability has become an increasingly important issue as awareness of climate change’s adverse effects continues to grow.
Online meetings are also arguably much more time-effective – as, to attend one, an employee would just need to access an online event platform on a work computer they are already using. Whether they are working in the usual office or at home, they wouldn’t need to leave the building or even the room in order to participate in the meeting.
Is this just a case of déjà vu?
While business travel had previously been expected to see a long-term decline in the wake of the September 11 attacks and then the 2008 financial crisis, it actually bounced back – something that might not happen yet again as the world slowly recovers from the pandemic.
With the GBTA estimating that the pandemic’s blow to business travel has been roughly ten times as severe this time around, it looks like online business meetings could indeed be here to stay.
