A Boeing 747 aircraft lands at the international airport in Frankfurt last week.
BERLIN: German companies are estimated to have spent €50 billion less on business travel in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic, German newspaper Welt am Sonntag reported. “We estimate that they spent a middle to high-single-digit billion amount on business trips last year,” Hans-Ingo Biehl, head of the VDR Association of German Travel Management, said in an interview with the newspaper.
That would mark a decline of as much as 90% from 2019. Biehl added that he expects business travel expenditure to remain well below pre-pandemic levels in 2021. In addition, Welt am Sonntag reported based on its own survey that large companies – such as Bayer AG and BASF SE – saw savings worth hundreds of millions of euros, and that many expect not to go back to prior travel levels.