Topic: With Zoom meetings, webinars and online programmes, is business travel
With Zoom meetings, webinars and online programmes, is business travel dead?
We won’t need to travel as แนวทางการเล่นสล็อตออนไลน์ much as we did but cross-border business
(and there will still be plenty) requires the crossing of borders, believes one business correspondent.
In early March, while the world’s airline fleets were being grounded, I wrote that, when the COVID-19
crisis was over, business travellers would be back. They needed the personal contact and Zoom wasn’t
the same.
Four months later, some of the planes are flying again. Several readers have reported to me that,
while the airports are largely empty, short-haul aircraft are often packed. But that may be because
there are far fewer flights.
Many companies still seem reluctant to allow their staff to travel, at least internationally. A June poll
of members of the Global Business Travel Association found that while 60 per cent thought their staff
would restart domestic trips in the next three months, only 24 per cent thought international trips
would resume in that time. As many as 44 per cent said they would not restart international business
trips over the next six months, or were unsure whether they would.
Much of that reflects how prevalent COVID-19 infection still is around the world. But many are
rethinking, during this remote-working period, how necessary business travel really is. I too have
moderated my views.
When I travelled for work before the lockdown, it was to organise and deliver programmes for the FT’s
executive education business. I wrote back in March that, while the webinars I had done until then
seemed reasonably effective, they were no substitute for being in the room, where you could judge
the impact of your delivery by the facial expressions and your jokes by the laughs. I said it would be
hard to land contracts without having met people in real life.