There is no real sense of recovery in the hospitality and tourism industry until people travel for business again. The good news is business travel and groups are anticipated to come back in 2022.
Business travel recovery is coming
Amex Global Business Travel, the world’s leading B2B (business-to-business) travel platform, released its 2021 financial results earlier. Business travel recovery is “well underway and gaining momentum.” Particularly, corporate travel recovery is accelerating. Its total transaction value in the last week of February 2022 had already reached 45% of the 2019 levels. An earlier projection only predicts the entire year of 2022 would reach 49% of the 2019 levels.
American Express CEO believed that the remote work trend also resulted in a new segment of business travel (Hur, 2022). For instance, more workers will travel to the companies’ headquarters to meet with their teams for a few days. He also added that the overall travel and expenses in the fourth quarter had reached 80% of the 2019 levels, with consumer (leisure travel) exceeding 100% already. Moreover, travel bookings remained strong entering 2022.
Group travel boom is anticipated in 2022
CoStar summarized the commentaries of a few hotel executives and concluded that group travel would have “a robust comeback” in 2022. Hotels in urban locations like New York City (NYC) got a hard hit by the pandemic. Recently, a large company booked a corporate meeting with over 25,000 room nights across 11 Marriott properties just one month before the event. That was the largest internal meeting Marriott had hosted in NYC since the pandemic. Besides NYC, the destinations that various hotel executives mentioned for increasing group demands include Boston, Chicago, Hawaii, New Orleans, Orlando, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, and San Francisco.
Groups and corporate events will benefit upper-upscale hotels
Groups and corporate events usually require the host properties to have a large meeting and functional space. That is exactly what upper-upscale convention hotels in urban locations offer.
Are you seeing a surge in group travel too? How confident do you feel about the group travel boom in 2022?
Note: This viewpoint was first published in the Hospitality News Magazine. The picture was downloaded from nh-hotels.com.
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