It might be a little too soon to get excited about your next corporate retreat or big business trip. In a study published earlier this month, Deloitte found that although business travel in the U.S. and Europe was continuing to recover, the sector “likely faces a limited upside”—and employers are going to remain choosy about how often they’re willing to book trips for staff.
Analysts at the accounting giant polled 334 corporate travel managers—executives with travel budget oversight—in five countries, including the U.S., in Feb. 2023. In the first half of 2023, spending on corporate travel was expected to surpass half of 2019 levels, and by the end of the year it was expected to reach two-thirds of pre-pandemic levels, the findings suggested.
Live events, like conferences, were expected to drive the business travel recovery in 2023, with more than half of the travel managers surveyed expecting industry events to reignite business travel.
However, the prognosis for regular business trips didn’t look so good, according to the study. The findings showed that while spending on business travel was likely to recover to 2019 levels by late 2024 or early 2025, the frequency of work trips was unlikely to fully recover.
“Adjusting for lost growth and inflation indicates that in real terms, corporate travel will likely be smaller than it was prior to the pandemic,” Deloitte’s analysts said. ESG initiatives were also likely to put a cap on how many trips employers would be willing to send their staff on in the future, the report said.
“Climate concerns will likely put a cap on corporate travel gains for several years to come. Four in 10 European companies and a third of U.S. companies say they need to reduce travel per employee by more than 20% to meet their 2030 sustainability targets,” its authors wrote.
Economic pressure
“As trip volume increases, travel managers face high prices, tough supplier negotiations, and sustainability mandates,” Deloitte’s experts said in their report. They noted that while leisure travel had returned to pre-pandemic levels months ago, corporate travel was struggling to stage a similar recovery.
“Decisions about these trips face an entirely different calculus, accounting for a host of factors: traveler safety and willingness to board a flight, client interest in meeting in person, the value of attending a conference, and whether a virtual conferencing platform can replace the trip—just to name a few,” Deloitte’s analysts explained.
While the easing of COVID-induced travel rules in many countries made traveling for business much simpler in the second half of last year, analysts said that these travel-friendly changes were competing with macroeconomic uncertainty when it came to swaying companies’ decisions on whether to reintroduce business trips.
While Deloitte’s predictions set a grim scene for the corporate travel landscape, one industry insider said the accounting giant’s outlook did not necessarily apply to business travel as a whole. Kieran Hartell, managing director of corporate travel at English travel agency Travel Counsellors, told Fortune that while he understood the shift toward travel cost reduction at large multinational firms, he was seeing small companies continue to invest in business travel.
This, he said, was a strategy small firms were using “as a key pillar for growing their business overseas and investing in face to face, human relationship building, aiding both growth and retention of existing relationships.” Business travel bookings among Travel Counsellors’ small business clients had returned to pre-pandemic levels in 2022, and in 2023 was already 59% higher than it had been in 2019, he said.
“There has been a particular focus on travel to North America and Europe, both with extended trip durations, suggesting clients are stacking multiple meetings into each journey and younger employees are extending through weekends to take advantage of ‘bleisure’ opportunities,” he said.
Emil Martinsek, CMO of Berlin-based travel agency GetYourGuide agreed that post-COVID, there had been a big rise in “bleisure” travel—a mixture of business and leisure travel.“Even while traveling to meet clients, connect with business partners or even working remotely, our customers are increasingly looking to maximize the experiences on their [business] trips,” he said in an email.
Business travel ‘will never recover’
While Hartell and Martinesk expressed optimism about the future of business travel, Robert Blaszczyk, head of the strategic clients department at currency exchange start-up Conotoxia, told Fortune that he agreed with Deloitte’s forecasts.
“Today, when the threat of coronavirus no longer forces remote work or prevents private or business travel, the solutions adopted at the height of the pandemic still work,” he said, arguing that handling things remotely that once would have required a business trip was “cheaper, faster, safer and easier.”
“Employees do not have to break away from their daily activities for a few days, and the employer does not have to spend money on tickets, allowances or hotels,” he added. “In the past, online meetings concerning serious issues were not so natural for us—now they are. That’s why, in my opinion, business travel will not disappear, but it will never recover to pre-COVID levels.”
Travel is increasingly divided between those who cannot afford to go anywhere in the cost of living ... [+]Getty Images
In the cost of living crisis, more and more people are cutting back on travel. And statistics show that people who are using schemes to travel now and pay later for their holidays, could be on a fast track into debt.
More People Are Cutting Back On Travel Due To The Cost Of Living Crisis
As the cost of petrol, energy and food has increased, more people have been looking to cut back on travel:
A recent survey by investment platform Saxo revealed that more than a quarter of Brits (28%) have had to cancel their holiday plans in the past year due to the cost of living crisis. The same percentage have also cut back on takeaways and eating out and one in five have turned their heating off altogether.
Jess Twitchin, CEO and Founder of QuirkyAccom.com, a travel company that offers unusual places to stay around the U.K. says that after the surge in travel following the pent up demand during Covid, the demand for package holidays has dropped and one third of people are looking to cut down on holiday spending. Twitchin added that the travel chaos caused by airlines and strikes and the fear of price hikes in EU destinations due to inflation are also leading to lots more plans to stay local.
In the U.K., google searches for ‘staycation’ recently surged by 233% as people tried to find a way to take holidays without going very far.
Buy Now Pay Later Schemes For Travel Can Lead To Debt
With statistics that show that 82% of Americans who are currently planning a trip need to save up for it, people are increasingly turning to Buy Now, Pay Later schemes.
Kayak recently announced a partnership with Affirm to help travelers buy now and pay back the cost over time. In this case, Affirm confirmed that they always underwrite every transaction, only extending credit to those they believe can responsibly afford to repay and they don’t charge hidden or late fees, or compound or deferred interest.
In other cases though, these new strategies to finance travel can lead to debt. For example, it’s increasingly common to find monthly payment schemes with cruise companies to repay the cost of an all-inclusive cruise—after you’ve been.
Accrue Savings, a company that helps you save for things before you buy, recently conducted a survey of Buy Now Pay Later platforms and concluded that 1 in 5 U.S. consumers have gone into debt because of travel (1 in 4 men).
Accrue Founder and CEO Michael Hershfield says that many users fail to make payments and rack up late fees. Almost half of those who use Buy Now, Pay Later have missed a payment, and more than a third use a credit card to make payments on the scheme.
So, for the 50% of Americans who already have credit card debt, such Buy Now, Pay Later schemes might not be the ideal solution.
Thursday 9 February—This article was amended in two ways. 1) Reference to a possible 600% increase in the charge paid by British holidaymakers under the ATOL scheme was taken out, as it was deemed to be misleading. This charge is under review and might also be reduced, depending on industry responses. 2) Affirm responded with a comment that was added in response to the article’s publication.
When I go on a trip, the only books I pack are the ones I can access through the library app on my phone. But I always come home with at least one more volume to add to my packed shelves.
Fight me on this: The absolute best place to hang out on vacation is in an independent bookstore. Staff recommendations let you peek into the mind of a city’s literary trendsetters. Local displays highlight authors and stories you won’t stumble across anywhere else. And, best of all, you are surrounded by kindred book-loving spirits who call the place you’re visiting home.
Stores that sell new books are pretty, clean and sell great swag. I love them. I take pictures of them. I spend eagerly on their tomes and tote bags. (Tally from a recent trip to New York City: three tote bags, three magnets, two children’s books, two books for me, the sheet music for the animated film “Encanto” and a pack of book-themed toddler socks.)
But for me, the true treasures are buried in the funky, sometimes-musty secondhand shops, where a great find is like kismet. These books have lived entire lives, probably right there in town, before having a chance encounter with your visiting self. And you get to bring home that unseen history along with whatever is written on the pages.
I still remember pulling a paperback copy of “The Whale Rider,” about a courageous Maori girl, from a shelf in a used bookstore in New Zealand on my honeymoon in 2015. Did it belong to a young reader on the South Island before finding its way into my suitcase and flying across an ocean? Whoever owned it might like to know that the copy now sits on a shelf full of stories about brave girls in my toddler’s room in D.C., waiting for the day she can absorb the story.
My used-book spoils never fail to bring me back to the excitement of travel. In London, I spent a delightful day during a work trip in 2017 wandering into tiny, old bookshops — marveling at how many there were — and picked up an Agatha Christie volume and a tattered, yellow-paged copy of “A Christmas Carol.”
A trip to Maine, home state of Stephen King, would not have been complete without the purchase of one of his novels in Portland. The bookseller wrote the price, $9.50, inside the copy of “Mr. Mercedes,” along with a note of approval: “Nice copy!”
The Last Bookstore in Los Angeles was an absolute wonderland for a book-seeker like me, with a local section that kept me pondering options far too long before narrowing my purchase to three: “The Lady in the Lake” by Raymond Chandler, “The Handyman” by Carolyn See and “The Other Side of Mulholland” by Stephen Randall. I like to imagine they had long and eventful lives in perfect California weather before ending up with me in the Mid-Atlantic. (Sorry, books.)
My favorite used-book tale comes from Tattered Corners, a new and used bookstore in my husband’s hometown of Meadville, Pa. While we were staying with his parents for several weeks last year, I sneaked away for an hour of browsing and discovered a lovely pre-owned copy of an Ann Patchett novel that I’d been wanting to read.
I opened the front page and saw an extremely familiar name. Here, finally, was a book whose past life didn’t have to remain a mystery: It had belonged to my mother-in-law.
But is time travel in fact possible? Given the popularity of the concept, this is a legitimate question. As a theoretical physicist, I find that there are several possible answers to this question, not all of which are contradictory.
The simplest answer is that time travel cannot be possible because if it was, we would already be doing it. One can argue that it is forbidden by the laws of physics, like the second law of thermodynamics or relativity. There are also technical challenges: it might be possible but would involve vast amounts of energy.
There is also the matter of time-travel paradoxes; we can — hypothetically — resolve these if free will is an illusion, if many worlds exist or if the past can only be witnessed but not experienced. Perhaps time travel is impossible simply because time must flow in a linear manner and we have no control over it, or perhaps time is an illusion and time travel is irrelevant.
Laws of Physics
Since Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity — which describes the nature of time, space and gravity — is our most profound theory of time, we would like to think that time travel is forbidden by relativity. Unfortunately, one of his colleagues from the Institute for Advanced Study, Kurt Gödel, invented a universe in which time travel was not just possible, but the past and future were inextricably tangled.
We can actually design time machines, but most of these (in principle) successful proposals require negative energy, or negative mass, which does not seem to exist in our universe. If you drop a tennis ball of negative mass, it will fall upwards. This argument is rather unsatisfactory, since it explains why we cannot time travel in practice only by involving another idea — that of negative energy or mass — that we do not really understand.
Time travel also violates the second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy or randomness must always increase. Time can only move in one direction — in other words, you cannot unscramble an egg. More specifically, by travelling into the past we are going from now (a high entropy state) into the past, which must have lower entropy.
This argument originated with the English cosmologist Arthur Eddington, and is at best incomplete. Perhaps it stops you travelling into the past, but it says nothing about time travel into the future. In practice, it is just as hard for me to travel to next Thursday as it is to travel to last Thursday.
Resolving Paradoxes
There is no doubt that if we could time travel freely, we run into the paradoxes. The best known is the “grandfather paradox”: one could hypothetically use a time machine to travel to the past and murder their grandfather before their father’s conception, thereby eliminating the possibility of their own birth. Logically, you cannot both exist and not exist.
Kurt Vonnegut’s anti-war novel Slaughterhouse-Five, published in 1969, describes how to evade the grandfather paradox. If free will simply does not exist, it is not possible to kill one’s grandfather in the past, since he was not killed in the past. The novel’s protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, can only travel to other points on his world line (the timeline he exists in), but not to any other point in space-time, so he could not even contemplate killing his grandfather.
The universe in Slaughterhouse-Five is consistent with everything we know. The second law of thermodynamics works perfectly well within it and there is no conflict with relativity. But it is inconsistent with some things we believe in, like free will — you can observe the past, like watching a movie, but you cannot interfere with the actions of people in it.
Could we allow for actual modifications of the past, so that we could go back and murder our grandfather — or Hitler? There are several multiverse theories that suppose that there are many timelines for different universes. This is also an old idea: in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Ebeneezer Scrooge experiences two alternative timelines, one of which leads to a shameful death and the other to happiness.
We can imagine that time does flow past every point in the universe, like a river around a rock. But it is difficult to make the idea precise. A flow is a rate of change — the flow of a river is the amount of water that passes a specific length in a given time. Hence if time is a flow, it is at the rate of one second per second, which is not a very useful insight.
Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking suggested that a “chronology protection conjecture” must exist, an as-yet-unknown physical principle that forbids time travel. Hawking’s concept originates from the idea that we cannot know what goes on inside a black hole, because we cannot get information out of it. But this argument is redundant: we cannot time travel because we cannot time travel!
Researchers are investigating a more fundamental theory, where time and space “emerge” from something else. This is referred to as quantum gravity, but unfortunately it does not exist yet. So is time travel possible? Probably not, but we don’t know for sure!
By: Peter Watson, The Conversation
Peter Watson is an emeritus professor of physics at Carleton University.
The Clock That Went Backward”(PDF). Archived from the original(PDF) on October 15, 2011. Retrieved December 4, 2011.Uribe, Augusto (June 1999). “The First Time Machine: Enrique Gaspar’s Anacronópete”.
NASA Goes FTL Part 1: Wormhole Physics”. Analog Science Fiction & Fact Magazine. Archived from the original on June 27, 2006. Retrieved December 2, 2006.Visser, Matt; Sayan Kar; Naresh Dadhich (2003). “Traversable wormholes with arbitrarily small energy condition violations”.
Chinese internet giants have become compliant parts of the regime they promised to disrupt. For Tencent’s Pony Ma and other tycoons the future is fraught. In April 2022, a resurgence of Covid spread seemingly unchecked through the financial centre of Shanghai. The government imposed a strict lockdown, confining millions to their homes, triggering mass-testing on a scale unseen since the initial outbreak and outraging affluent urban residents who were increasingly sceptical about China’s Covid-zero policy.
In an attempt to control public opinion, the government told social media sites including WeChat – the super-app used by two-thirds of China’s population – to wipe and scrape posts deemed negative or critical of the policy. But the censorship backfired. There was an unprecedented public outcry, which became a virtual protest. A video documenting the dire fallout of lockdown began circulating online.
The six-minute clip known as Voices of April – a montage of audio recordings encompassing the cries of babies separated from parents during quarantine, residents demanding food and the pleas of a son seeking medical help for his critically ill father – resonated with the tens of millions in Shanghai and more across the country. The video was quickly marked as banned content and taken down from social media platforms in China. On the Twitter-equivalent Weibo, even the word “April” was temporarily restricted from search results.
Many deemed the video a neutral yet essential documentation of the human toll of Shanghai’s lockdown. A backlash ensued, as defiant users repeatedly shared the video in ways that could dodge web censors. Some posted the video upside down, others superimposed words or images or embedded other footage. WeChat censors tried to wipe posts sharing the video, but it was like a multi-headed hydra: no sooner did one get blocked, than another would pop up.
This seminal moment embodied the dynamics between the Chinese government and the country’s giant tech companies. On the frontline was Tencent, the entertainment and tech conglomerate that owns WeChat. For the better part of three decades, Beijing tolerated and even celebrated entrepreneurship. As the country leapfrogged into the digital age, China produced one company worth $1bn every 3.8 days in 2018, just a year after Tencent overtook Facebook to become the fifth largest company in the world.
The amount of money Chinese-focused venture and private equity funds raised grew nearly fourfold to $120bn. That bounty helped China transform from industrial backwater into one of the most dynamic and coveted markets on the planet. In addition to generating revenue, companies such as Tencent complied with government orders when it came to monitoring its citizens. For an authoritarian regime ruling over a population scattered across an area almost as large as the US, an app that dominates every facet of life proves enormously useful.
Some say WeChat should be called WeCheck, such is its capacity for mass surveillance. The early days of Chinese tech also saw the construction of the Great Firewall of China. One in five people on the planet using the internet access it through a filter that obscures Facebook, Twitter, Snap, Instagram, the New York Times and YouTube. In a sense, it’s a parallel universe, where nearly a billion people live and thrive – much to westerners’ surprise – on China’s equivalent of such mainstays. There’s Meituan for Deliveroo, Didi Chuxing for Uber, WeChat for WhatsApp and Facebook.
The services are often even better in terms of convenience and design. The Swiss army knife of a super-app, WeChat is the most deft at merging the functions of various western platforms, allowing people to chat, shop or order a takeaway. Domestically WeChat is known as Weixin, and the company has made a point of emphasising that it operates as two apps within and outside the mainland. China’s deficit of privacy controls means its companies and government have an edge when it comes to collecting the data that empowers the algorithms that screen, monitor, name-shame and, sometimes, imprison its citizens.
The dynamics between Chinese tech companies and the authorities are like no other. Before the pandemic I sat down once with an official and talked about the vicissitudes that startups and entrepreneurs endure. “No matter what kind of hotshot you are, we will always have a way of showing you who’s boss,” the person said, making an offhand remark about Tencent’s owner, Pony Ma. “Don’t think because you control a billion users and moved to Singapore or some overseas country that we can’t do anything about you.”
The official told me that when regulators felt Tencent needed to be taught a lesson, they would step up censorship efforts, block or shut down web services till the company got the message. The tactics were not always conspicuous. Given WeChat’s overseas ambitions at the time, they would sometimes disrupt its service for global users, delaying messages or transactions for just half a minute. “That small hold-up is more than enough to drive users crazy and make people ditch the app altogether,” the person said. “That’s how you show them some colour.”
The Wall no longer resides just within China. When Chinese people travel outside the country, the Wall follows them via their telecom providers. A person using a China Mobile sim card is barred from roaming on Google. Authoritarian nations in Africa, south-east Asia and Russia see the appeal of the model. They too want to create their own intranet. As the internet splits in two, aligning itself between the American and Chinese models, Tencent’s story offers a window into an alternative vision of what the global online sphere could become.
Tencent’s products are so convenient and intuitive; yet in the back of everyone’s minds is the knowledge that their every move, location and utterance is documented and potentially scrutinised. Nowhere is this contradiction more apparent than at Tencent’s headquarters, in the heart of southern Shenzhen’s hi-tech district.
Tencent’s office building took five years and more than half a billion dollars to construct. Ma handpicked NBBJ, the architect responsible for Amazon, Google and Samsung’s headquarters. But the billionaire wanted it to be more than a statement of financial largesse. With its twin gleaming towers of glass and steel, he turned the building into one of the world’s biggest laboratories for new internet services and connected devices. It features holographic tour guides, conference rooms that adjust temperatures based on attendance, and alerts for the best parking spots before commuters arrive.
What struck me was that within the halls of a building that serves as a towering paean to futurism and commerce, the Communist party’s influence is omnipresent. In its open-plan reading room, alongside books about the cosmos and the ancient Greek and Roman empires, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s book – tabulating his speeches and thoughts about how to govern – features on the most prominent shelves. QR codes in the gym bring up links to stories documenting battle victories during the Long March.
Even these demonstrations of loyalty are not enough. Common sense would suggest that the Communist party would be supportive of companies such as Tencent and encourage their expansion overseas. But Xi has chosen to make sure the aspirations of a rising class of immensely wealthy entrepreneurs are tamed before they turn political. It was only a matter of time before he went after these national champions.
A crackdown that started with the financial technology industry in 2020, has quickly expanded to engulf every sector from online education to gaming, and ride-hailing to food delivery. With footprints in all of these sectors via its investments in some 800 companies, Tencent has felt the pinch.
Despite Pony Ma’s reputation for being the most low-key and cautious of Chinese tech moguls, Tencent has not been spared. China halted its app rollouts for about a month in late 2021, has curtailed gaming time for those under 18, ordered an overhaul of its financial units, fined it for investment deal disclosure violations and suspended new game approvals this year.
The change in approach to the tech sector is underpinned by shifts in Xi’s priorities. It mirrors crackdowns in other sectors, including property. As China’s economy slows and Xi tries to increase the nation’s birthrate, the policies underscore the Communist party’s growing resolve to respond to mounting public dissatisfaction with hoarded wealth and narrowing avenues for advancement.
A phrase that has emerged in tandem with the crackdowns is “common prosperity”, which refers to China’s goal of becoming a modernised socialist society. The implications for China’s tech industry are far-reaching, and could shape the playbook for the next few decades.
There’s a Chinese saying “Li yu tiao long men” – “a carp leaping over the dragon’s gate”. Legend has it that if the carp manages to swim upstream and vault an arch atop a waterfall on the Yellow river, it transforms into an Oriental dragon, a snake-like creature symbolising imperial power. The story of China’s internet tycoons, like Pony Ma, for the past two decades is that of a generation of carp becoming dragons. The twist, though, is that these idealistic geeks, who ventured out to change the world, are now shackled and have become part of a system they wanted to change. Once self-made dragons have achieved the level of success they have in China, the more important question seems to be: when and how do they bow out unscathed?
Tijana Simic/Getty Images
However, the prognosis for regular business trips didn’t look so good, according to the study. The findings showed that while spending on business travel was likely to recover to 2019 levels by late 2024 or early 2025, the frequency of work trips was unlikely to fully recover.
While the easing of COVID-induced travel rules in many countries made traveling for business much simpler in the second half of last year, analysts said that these travel-friendly changes were competing with macroeconomic uncertainty when it came to swaying companies’ decisions on whether to reintroduce business trips.
“There has been a particular focus on travel to North America and Europe, both with extended trip durations, suggesting clients are stacking multiple meetings into each journey and younger employees are extending through weekends to take advantage of ‘bleisure’ opportunities,” he said.
