news analysis: business travel British Airways has retired its entire of fleet of 24 Boeing 747s as a consequence of their financial hit in the pandemic
Return ticket?
Will business travel bounce back? And if so when, and how far? Mark Bursa
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or anyone involved in executive chauffeuring, or even a regular private hire business with a business clientele, there’s one question that really needs answering: Will business travel recover to pre-Covid levels? And if so, when?
With vaccines now being deployed, there is hope that some degree of normality will return to the working environment in the first few months of 2021. But the predictions are less encouraging for the return of big-ticket items for the private hire sector: air travel, business events, trade shows and hotels all take a more pessimistic view. And while there are signs that tourism might open up more quickly, European travel is about to get another kick in the teeth through Brexit, while other sectors such as cruises are also taking a long-term view. Private hire operators are having to come to terms with the new post-Covid reality. Keen Group managing director Keith Keen believes some of the enforced changes of 2020 are
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here to stay: “Do we need city offices? Do we need to fly to New York for a meeting? Or are people comfortable with a Zoom meeting? The market will recover, but not to the same level as before – and for all the right reasons,” he says. In the longer term, however, the prognosis is good. According to new US research, the global market for taxi and limousine services, estimated at $127.1 billion in 2020, is
[below] The world’s cruise ship fleet was ‘furloughed’ for the entire 2020 holiday season
projected to reach a revised size of $334.9bn by 2027, growing at a rate of 14.8% over the next seven years. The question is when this growth will start to kick in. And what form will it take? Right now, 2027 seems an awfully long way away. The International Air Transport Association represents the world’s airlines, and while it sees some signs of recovery starting in 2021, the association says a full recovery to 2019 pre-pandemic air travel will not happen until at least 2024. IATA’s Director General and CEO Alexandre de Juniac said in a statement: “This crisis is devastating and unrelenting. Airlines have cut costs by 45.8%, but revenues are down 60.9%. The result is that airlines will lose $66 for every passenger carried this year.” He continued: “We need to get borders safely re-opened without quarantine so that people will fly again. And with airlines expected to bleed cash at least until the fourth quarter of 2021 there is no time to lose.” According to IATA research, most people who plan to travel in 2021 will do so to
DECEMBER 2020
