Duty of care and traveller wellbeing will be the biggest priorities for UK travel buyers and managers in 2021, according to new research out today.
The Institute of Travel Management’s Top Priorities for 2021 survey of 109 corporate travel buyers found that controlling budget had been pushed down into third, largely because of the Covid pandemic.
The survey's respondents expect significant reductions in travel budgets for the coming year. Almost one in four said that they expected their business travel spend in the first half of 2021 to be 50 to 75 per cent down on 2019.
However, they expected things to recover slightly by the second half of the year, with 49 per cent saying that the decline would be limited to somewhere between zero and 50 per cent.
Internal meetings are an area where cuts will be made. Buyers in the survey predict that spending on such gatherings is likely to halve from 2019 levels, to around 20 per cent of total business travel spend.
Perhaps inevitably, buyers think that government, border, quarantine and testing requirements will be the biggest challenge facing business travel in 2021 but traveller confidence comes a close second.
2021 will also bring the end of the Brexit transition period. Some 45 per cent of respondents to the ITM survey said that their travel programme was not fully prepared.
TMCs that have struggled during the pandemic because of their reliance on transaction fees – which have slumped in line with the fall in traffic – will be heartened by the survey's finding that 63 per cent of buyers would be open to changing the structure of their agreement with their TMC to support recovery.