Flying for business slumps by 15%
Wednesday, 05 Nov, 2009
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The number of business travellers flying was down by 15% in the third quarter of the year, new figures show.
Findings from the Guild of Travel Management Companies reveal that no frills carriers are faring just as poorly as scheduled full service carriers – challenging the theory that business travellers are trading down to budget airlines to cut costs.
Air travel has now seen a steady decline in every quarterly transaction survey conducted by the guild since third quarter 2008.
The quarterly transaction survey monitors the number of transactions by GTMC members, which includes the top 30 travel management companies in the UK, across a range of categories including hotel, aviation and car hire transactions.
Business travel continues to show a decline across a range of categories in addition to aviation.
Furthermore, the trend of growth in “other” transactions by TMC’s – insurance, passport/visa and other value added services – which showed robust performances in the last quarter of 2008 and first quarter of this year, continued to dip in the third quarter. This illustrates a possible decline in incentive and event travel in addition to business travel.
Hotel bookings through TMC’s showed a decline of 17% on 2008 figures for the same period, shadowing the performance of airline transactions.
Car rental, which has performed poorly for well over a year, returned weak figures for the third quarter of 2009 with a decline of 16% year on year.
However, rail travel – up 13% year on year – continues to show significant growth.
GTMC chief executive Philip Carlisle said: “There is a definite downward trend across the business travel sector in every category except rail, which shows that, while politicians, analysts and economists talk of green shoots of recovery, UK Plc doesn’t necessarily share that view.
“The rate of decline in some categories is starting to slow down but we are yet to see any positive signs.
“An interesting observation is the growth and continuing impressive performance of rail travel – which could mean that when recovery does come back into the business travel sector we could see a different pattern of travel by the business community.”
by Phil Davies
Phil Davies
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