Is business travel in Europe back for good?

Have you heard of “revenge travel”? This relatively new term became “hot” at the beginning of 2022 when most of the European countries lifted COVID-related restrictions. Travellers who missed out on venturing outside their hometowns for 2 years have now felt the need to finally enjoy travelling again.

And not just for holidays - business travel suddenly was available again, and tempted executives with additional incentives to fly or take a train. The corporate travel return will get its own piece of this article, but let’s start with the leisure travel trends first.

Are we back to the pre-pandemic travel levels and trends?

A common attitude shown on social media and blogs was to “make up” for the lost time and travel as much as possible. This type of attitude got a name, and it was generally called “revenge travel”.

So were these just empty promises or did people actually return to pre-lockdown travelling?

We can easily check traveller’s attitudes and plans using Google Trends - a tool calculating interest in a particular phrase or keyword on Google, over time.

Here’s what happened with searches for “Airport Check-in” in the last 1 year among users in the UK:

And here’s a keyword search for SunExpress - a typical holiday airline, which mostly charters flights to travel agencies:

KeyNest, as a platform used for short lets check-ins, currently owns the biggest database of keys in the world (active since 2016). We have dived deep into the data from the last 2 years, and checked the increased key movements in major European cities.

Here’s what it showed:

KeyNest data: note it includes both leisure and business travel check-ins merged

With a huge bookings jump both in London and Paris, it seems like the comments about revenge travel being in full swing are definitely true. KeyNest currently operates a network of 4,000 locations for key check-in worldwide, so the data covers hundreds of locations in both cities. Having a large database like this (hundreds of thousands of key movements each year) creates solid proof for the return of pre-lockdown travel.

What about business travel?

Let’s focus on business travel now. Quite some voices on LinkedIn and in articles - for example, this one in Financial Times, predicted that the business travel industry would never recover. But is it the case? Amidst the widely spread Zoom calls and all kinds of remote solutions, are people still keen to travel for business?

The most recent report gives some hope, backed by optimistic data from an international high-speed rail operator. Eurostar has released an update on continued recovery in the first half of 2022, reporting a “robust return of business travel”. The operator said that business travel on its services had returned to 70 per cent of 2019 levels, with 75 per cent of the firm’s pre-pandemic timetables now in operation.

There was also a survey released (see graphic below), showing that 78 per cent of travellers were expecting to travel more or the same for business between the UK and Europe compared to 2019.

Eurostar, being a transportation mode of choice to many business travellers, seems like a good brand to look up to for business travel insights. For a larger pool of actions, let’s look again at Google Trends.

The searches for “business class” show gradual growth, especially since the beginning of 2022:

Interested in the topic? Reach out to us at zuza@keynest.com if you are keen to see more data gathered by us on the topic.