LONDON: With trade shows cancelled and companies limiting or even banning travel, Mark Manduca, aviation analyst at Citi, recently raised the question: “Will corporate travel ever truly recover again?”
When the coronavirus crisis is over, will companies that have managed just fine with video conferencing decide to carry on, given how much cheaper it is?We have heard similar questions before. I wrote a story in the early 1990s, after the first Gulf war and the economic downturn, quoting experts who said company bosses had noticed a fall in costs from the resulting decline in travel and decided to make it permanent.They have partly proved true.
Coronavirus may give this decline another push, but there is an irreducible minimum of travel that business people need to do and that is unlikely to disappear. Corporate travel will return for four reasons.First, it is hard to establish a business relationship with someone you have never met in person. Basic video conferencing, over Zoom or a competing system, is fine.
But something changes when you meet in real life. There is more ease, a better sense of who the other person is, shared jokes — and a greater chance of winning more business.I spend much of my time delivering courses for the Financial Times’s executive education arm. I have run webinars for students in Asia and the Middle East. They are fine but not as good as being there.
On video you can’t walk around the seminar room. You can’t sense the change in breathing and eye contact when people are more or less interested. You aren’t sure where the laughs come from, or why.Second, while companies grumble about the expense of stands at trade shows, they are an effective way of meeting crowds of potential customers.