Travel & Leisure

Business travel is an art that demands attention to detail. Ensuring a comfortable and hassle-free stay begins right when you start booking your hotel room. Yet, many critical factors are frequently overlooked.

Fasten your seat belts as the 'work from anywhere' era steps on the gas. In the fast lane of this new age, hush holidays are cruising in, a silent phenomenon stirring duty of care considerations into a tricky maze that has organisations reaching for their strategy maps.

For the first time in history, there are five generations in the workplace. From Generation Z (Gen Z) to the silent generation, the diversity of life stages is the most complicated it's been in history. In the same way that corporate culture and policies are evolving to stamp out issues like the “wage gap”, organisations need to address the issues created by the “age gap”.

The worldwide travel market has expanded considerably from just over 400,000 travellers in 1973 to 5.56 billion in 2019. Fighting for market share in this booming industry are two global commercial aircraft manufacturers: Boeing and Airbus.

South African business travel is rapidly accelerating in 2023 as most travellers have by now dusted off their suitcases and started taking to the skies again. Interestingly, former road warriors may have become slightly ‘travel unfit’, leading to mistakes, oversights, or difficulties during a trip.

The pursuit of sleep is big business. In fact, Statista predicts that the global sleep industry will be worth 585 billion US dollars by 2024. We’re talking mattresses, luxury bedding, pillows (the pillow market alone was valued at about 15.6 billion US dollars worldwide back in 2019), block-out blinds, soundproofing, supplements and apps.

Business travel is back with a bang – at least in South Africa – with business travel numbers exceeding 2019 levels. This according to a recent whitepaper, SME Travel Trends for 2023, that indicates that demand has returned a lot quicker and more aggressively than initially anticipated.

Pre-COVID-19, travel and tourism contributed 6.9% to South Africa’s gross domestic product, declining to 3.7% in 2020. Similarly, the number of jobs created by the sector dropped by 32.4% from 1.5 million to 987,000. It was, according to Statistics SA, bigger than agriculture, utilities and construction.

While corporate travel is starting to recover, the pandemic continues to impact the industry, and industry players can see a change in booking behaviour. For example, the shift to last-minute bookings, necessitated by the uncertainty of the past two years, hasn't subsided as quickly as expected.

Having reached the halfway mark of 2022, there’s little doubt that travel is rebounding – and quickly. So much so, that airports around the world are reporting delays, queues and flight disruptions as they struggle to hire (and rehire) staff quickly enough to meet the huge surge in demand.