A new SAP Concur research enumerated the five challenges threatening business travel in 2024, amid the challenges of remote working for the global workforce.
Efficient business travel is a top priority, as it brings in access to new markets, insights, and development opportunities. However, according to SAP Concur, there are complications.
The study, which polled 3,750 travellers and 600 travel managers across global markets including 850 respondents from the Asia Pacific countries of Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Korea, India, Singapore and Malaysia, pointed out to "friction points" that business leaders must understand.
- The threat of disruption
- About 86% of APAC travellers have been forced to make last-minute changes in the past year because of unexpected delays, cancellations or the need to re-route.
- Travellers have had enough of losing out on their personal time and critical career connections. About 82% opt to add ‘booking buffers’ to the start or end of their journey, or both, incorporating extra time to counteract unexpected schedule changes. This frustrating cycle discourages business travel altogether. To reduce traveller stress, organisations should consider allowing travellers extra turnaround time for each booking, private connecting transport, and adding features to travel management tools to allow easy rebooking when disruptions take place.
- Reluctance to Travel
- APAC business travellers cite safety (42%) or political or social (36%) concerns about the destination as the most common reasons that would cause them to decline a business trip.
- The trend of combining leisure and business, or bleisure, has gained popularity among business travellers, but recent cost-saving measures by companies threaten this balance. More than 28% of APAC companies are reducing the ability for employees to work remotely, while travelling for pleasure or combining personal travel with business trips.
- While a majority (72%) ofAPAC business travellers stated that travel is critical for their career advancement, 22% of employees would decline a business trip if they couldn't extend it for personal travel, and 26% would also refuse if they couldn't make adjustments outside of company policy.
- The toss-up between sustainability and costs
- Over a quarter (28%) of APAC business travellers are willing to decline a business trip due to the environmental impact or the inability to choose sustainable options, while a further 28% claim their company has cut back on paying more on sustainable travel options over the past 12 months.
- Around 31% of APAC travellers say their company prioritises sustainable travel options, but 1 in 3 travel managers globally face difficulty booking travel as they are expected to provide more sustainable travel options without an adequate travel budget.
- Unequal access to travel opportunities
- Almost three-quarters (72%) of APAC business travellers say that travel is critical for their career advancement – but the same proportion feel they haven’t received equal opportunity to travel compared to their colleagues.
- Staff cite reasons for unequal access such as their level of seniority (22%), age (18%) and gender (10%).
- The need for AI solutions and education
- Most APAC travellers (95%) are open to using AI-enabled options when arranging travel, but there is a prevailing “wait and see” attitude. Only 6% are comfortable using AI-enabled options currently.
- As much as 90% of APAC business travellers want more company support, including assurances for personal data protection, potential biases, and protection from repercussions if AI-assisted bookings contravene company policy.
"The research suggests that APAC organisations need to better balance fluid and sometimes conflicting corporate and employee travel needs, stem employee reluctance to travel due to work-life balance concerns, and accommodate growing demands for sustainable travel," says Sushant Jain, chief revenue officer, Asia Pacific & Japan, Spend Management at SAP.
"Measures businesses could take include improving the flexibility of their travel policies, and better harnessing emerging technology like AI to obtain data-based insights to streamline workflows, minimise disruption, cut cost and raise boost employee satisfaction."
Jain adds that while leaders will not be able to solve travel disruption overnight, they can make it more manageable for staff.
"By introducing measures to improve travel flexibility, training opportunities and next-generation technologies, APAC organisations can adapt to a challenging market and future-proof their business travel posture for the long term."
