Tag: Travel Management Company (TMC)

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.

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”.

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.

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.

Life looks a whole lot different since the dawn of COVID-19 – face masks, elbow greetings, temperature checks at practically every entrance, and an overwhelming amount of sanitiser dominating our days. And business travel definitely isn’t an exception.

COVID-19 has changed a lot of things – including the way that companies and employees approach business travel. Just over a year since COVID-19 made its presence known in South Africa, it would seem as though some of these changes are fleeting, while others are here to stay.

As President Cyril Ramaphosa announced a return to Level 1, there is a renewed sense of positivity in the air and the potential for new beginnings. Now is the time for businesses to rebuild what was lost or damaged as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and to start getting back to ‘normal’. It is time to get up, get moving (literally) and resume corporate travel.