Printing Innovation Asia Issue 9 2020
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How far can we g using video calls "I'm not affraid of business challenges", people use to tell me, then along cam the global pandemic caused by COVID-19. Now in 2020, remote working and video chats have largely become the norm. Almost 100% of business travel was halted in response to the outbreak, and further clamped down by a series of border closures and travel restrictions worldwide. While the ones that are open you think three times about traveling there..By Publisher Paul Callaghan Meanwhile, remote meetings using the likes of Microsoft Teams, SKYPE, Cisco and Zoom have made many question if business travel will ever fully return to the shape and scale of pre-pandemic days. However, research published by Harvard University this month suggests that business travel will remain in the ascendancy because of its ability to spread ‘knowhow’. Knowhow is different to “information and codified knowledge that exists in books, computer files, graphs and algorithms,” the Ivy League university shares. Instead, “knowhow only exists in brains, and moves very slowly from brain to brain through years of experience.” “Moving knowhow quickly involves moving brains,” and that’s where
business travel comes in – and will remain strong, Harvard believes. Business travel builds economies Beyond the expansion of ‘knowhow’ across the globe, payment card data supplied by Mastercard and analysed by Harvard also demonstrated that business travel had a positive impact on GDP in both travellers’ origin and destination countries. The data showed that if Australia stops sending business travellers abroad – as it’s now largely doing by way of closed borders and travel bans – this would most heavily affect New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Zimbabwe, the United Arab Emirates, Philippines and Sri Lanka, in that order. If you look at Singapore and its 4 airport terminals, 2 of which have
shut until such a time that travel is on the rise again, then add in the hotel situation that heavily relies on business travel, the picture just looks worse and worse. Then you include Bangkok airport and its favourite status as a convention and exhibition hub, I think you get the picture. In fact, looking at Australian business travellers heading overseas, they are responsible for 0.09% of total global GDP. While that number may not sound significant, it places Australian travellers just behind those from Singapore and China in terms of global economic worth. Australia itself also heavily benefits from inbound business travellers from overseas.
