Swiss business travel increases continuously
Despite the advance of modern communication technologies since the start of the Corona pandemic, business travel continues to be an important factor for companies. In Switzerland, there is a slight trend toward more expensive booking classes and longer travel times.
Face-to-face meetings and professional networking came to a virtual standstill at the start of the Corona pandemic. But according to a survey of 111 top managers in Germany by corporate payment specialist AirPlus International, 84 percent of respondents believe that these face-to-face meetings in particular are essential for building business relationships and mutual trust. This is not only true in our northern neighbor: "We see this attitude quite clearly in Switzerland," confirms Andy Stehrenberger, Managing Director of AirPlus International in Switzerland. The majority of respondents also prefer face-to-face meetings for negotiations (cited by 76 percent), occasions with emotional communication content (73 percent), discussions of confidential and sensitive content (71 percent), customer acquisition and retention, trade show visits and industry meetings (70 percent each), and strategic internal meetings (56 percent). In contrast, occasions such as the exchange of knowledge or collaboration in project teams can continue to take place virtually in the future in the view of the respondents.
Swiss business travel has increased significantly since the beginning of the year
In Switzerland, the numbers of airline ticket transactions processed via AirPlus have been rising steadily since the beginning of the year, as the AirPlus Business Travel Index reveals. After a brief stagnation in April, almost three times as many flights were booked via AirPlus in May 2022 than in January. As travel business picks up, the gap to the pre-crisis year 2019 is also melting from month to month. In the month of May 2022, the billing volume in Switzerland was only 15.1 percent below the level of May 2019.
It is striking that Swiss companies are making travel more expensive in the current year and are increasingly allowing their employees to travel in business class. On intercontinental flights, the share of business class flights increased by 2.3 percentage points to 50.5 percent from January to May 2022 compared to the pre-Corona year 2019, and on European routes by 1.9 percentage points to 5.2 percent. This trend is most striking on Swiss domestic routes: Here, the business class share increased by 18.8 percentage points to 26.4 percent in the first five months of 2022 (Jan-May 2019: 7.6 percent).
Swiss spend longer on business trips
While the average advance booking period in spring 2022 decreased only for intercontinental flights - from 34.2 days in 2019 to 31 days in 2022 - some clear shifts are evident in the duration of trips. From January to May 2022, intercontinental trips lasted an average of 12.5 days (2019: 10.3 days), European trips 4.6 days (2019: 3.7 days) and business trips in Switzerland increased markedly to an average of 18.5 days (2019: 3.4 days). "This clearly shows today's possibilities and acceptance towards 'remote work'," says Andy Stehrenberger. "Instead of traveling from A to B several times within Switzerland, trips are combined or the workplace is relocated right away for a longer period of time. This fact also testifies to an ecological rethink," says Stehrenberger.
The fact that the topic of sustainable business travel enjoys high importance in companies is also confirmed by the results of the AirPlus survey in Germany. Almost all of the companies surveyed state that they have the topic on their agenda. The most important measures include bundling business appointments into less frequent, but longer trips (named by 60 percent) - only the selection of the most environmentally friendly means of travel possible was named even more frequently (64 percent).
