The economy is more problematic for business travel recovery than COVID-19.

 While the leisure sector has been the first to fully recover from the devastating blow the travel industry received as a result of COVID-19, it appears that corporate travel is also gradually making a comeback. Yet, according to Business Travel News, this kind of travel now has to overcome new and distinct challenges to fully recover.

The recovery of international business travel has reached the halfway point, but economic concerns have now replaced COVID-19 as the segment's main roadblock, according to a recent survey by the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA), which polled a group of 594 members made up of travel buyers and suppliers.

Domestic business travel has regained 63% of 2019 volumes, according to travel managers who took part in the GBTA poll, which was conducted from September 20 to September 26. International business travel has restored 50% of 2019 levels.

A little over a quarter of the purchasers surveyed claimed that pre-pandemic levels of overseas travel have been surpassed. The majority of respondents stated regulations now apply to both domestic and international travel, and 86 percent of respondents said their businesses now permit non-essential business travel.

In a statement, GBTA CEO Suzanne Neufang stated, "We continue to see progress as business travel works its way back to being a $1.4 trillion global sector, pre-pandemic." "Understanding the context behind the revival of international business travel is also crucial. Asia is still expanding its borders, global international business travel has just recently begun to ramp up, and the United States has only allowed unfettered travel since June."

Just 4% of the polled travel suppliers indicated that they anticipate fewer business trip bookings in the upcoming year, with COVID-19 being the most likely factor. In contrast, 80% of suppliers thought that travel budgets being frozen, which is at an all-time high, constituted the biggest threat to bookings. or an upcoming downturn.

However, at this time, both sellers and purchasers agree that business travel will do better in 2023 than it did in 2022. Nearly 80% of travel managers predicted that their staff would take more business trips in 2019 than they did this year, and roughly 2/3 predicted that internal and external travel would rise annually by 2023. Suppliers anticipated that corporate clients' travel expenses would climb in 2019 by 80%, and 2023 bookings would rise by 85% over the current year.