Travel Industry Coalition Predicts Business Travel Rebound By 2025

An annual report by the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) analyzing the business travel sector predicts business travel will rise toward the end of the year and will fully recover by 2025.

“The pandemic has been devastating for business travel and it’s clear our industry will take some time to recover given the challenges we’re facing on multiple fronts,” Dave Hilfman, interim executive director of GBTA, said in a Tuesday (Feb. 2) news release. “Economic recovery is already underway, although very uneven across countries and sectors.”

Hilfman added that vaccines are the central key to the industry’s global recovery. Another factor will be changes made under the Biden Administration regarding trade, borders, quarantine and other policies.

The largest business travel association in the world, the GBTA has released its BTI Outlook report for 12 years. The report analyzes business travel spending and growth across 75 countries and 48 industries.

According to the report, business travel spending is anticipated to go up 21 percent in 2021, with most of the increase toward the end of the year, and will further accelerate in 2022, when in-person meetings and other activities resume. Growth is expected to slow in 2023, but expected to be higher than historical averages of 4.6 percent. By the end of 2024, the sector is forecast to hit roughly $1.4 trillion. The pre-pandemic peak was $1.43 trillion. A full recovery is anticipated by 2025.

The business travel sector took a 68 percent nosedive as the coronavirus made its way around the world, to $738 billion from April 1, 2020 to year-end. A strong first quarter in 2020, which was pre-COVID, should show a 52 percent decrease for all of 2020, to $694 billion USD, down from $1.4 trillion in 2019, according to GBTA.

In December of 2020, analysts forecast the global market for business travel in 2020 would drop 54 percent. Zoom seemingly came out of nowhere when it came to the rescue of suddenly-remote households. Suddenly, everything from board meetings to the courthouse were doing business with little effort or tech know-how via Zoom. The digital workforce is not expected to kill business travel entirely, but it will take a hit.