The reopening of international borders has accelerated business travel recovery, according to data from Trip.com Group’s corporate travel arm Trip.Biz. In the first half of 2022, corporate travel bookings for international flights grew by 196 per cent year on year, with bookings for international hotels increasing by 315 per cent year on year for the same period.
As business travel bounces back, bleisure travel – which combine business stays with leisure breaks – is increasingly welcomed by business travelers who yearn to explore new destinations in post-pandemic times.
The bleisure trend has seen enormous growth in recent months, fueled by the enduring popularity of remote working. Rageb has also noticed the popularity of bleisure travel among his friends. ‘Because of the change in the working landscape since the pandemic, many people can enjoy working from home, so they have more flexible time to travel. Many of my Egyptian friends travel to the North Coast or the Red Sea during the summer, stay by the beach and work at the same time.’
In response to this trend, the travel industry is adapting to suit the bleisure customer by offering new services and amenities that make it easier for this traveller group to seamlessly transition between work and relaxation.
Trip.Biz has seen first-hand the growing demand for bleisure trips, so much so that it now provides a ‘personal trips’ option for corporate travel users, a new function that was brought to market this year, complete with discounts and promotional offers. As a result, in July 2022, personal trip bookings on the corporate travel platform doubled compared to those made in June, and the number of business trip users viewing personal trip products increased by nearly 60% in July alone.
Following on from the surge in popularity of the personal trips function on Trip.Biz, the platform’s CEO Steven Zhang is looking for ways to further evolve Trip.Biz to cater to the bleisure traveler. “We understand how vital it is to our business to appeal to the needs of newly emerging traveler groups, and the bleisure traveler group is only set to grow. We look forward to analyzing Trip.Biz data for the second half of 2022 to see how this innovative trend continues to develop.”
