PANDEMIC HURTS BUSINESS TRAVEL

#BusinessTravel #travel #coronavirus #COVID19 #FlattenTheCurve #pandemic
Many people who had traveled frequently for their jobs have not been able to during the pandemic.
That scenario is a nightmare for hotels, airlines and others in the hospitality industry that banked on big-time business travel.
To add insult to injury, there may be less personal travel during the holiday season.
For business travelers themselves, it’s a mixed blessing. The good news is they are home more often. The bad news: they can’t accumulate hotel, airline and other points for free travel and accommodations for leisure.
The Associated Press discussed this in an article that was also published Nov. 12, 2020, in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Traveling for business was considered a necessity, albeit an expensive one, for companies who wanted representatives to have face-to-face meetings with clients. In-person meetings are always better than virtual meetings, but to prevent the spread of coronavirus, the virtual meeting became a way of life.
So as companies evaluate the safety, cost and necessity of business travel, there will likely be a “new normal,” experts say.
Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian expects the new normal for business travel to be down 10 percent to 20 percent, the article says.
“I do think corporate travel is going to come back faster than people suspect. I just don’t know if it will come back to full volume,” the article quotes Bastian.
Dubai-based MBC Group, which operates 19 television stations, believes it’s unlikely that employees will travel as often, because they’ve shown they don’t need to, the article says.
So what does this mean for you? If you don’t travel for your job, but work in the hospitality or transportation industry, it could mean job cutbacks.
If you had a job for which you traveled a good bit, and your company sees that travel is no longer as essential as it thought it was, you need to be concerned for your job. With the advent of companies like Salesforce, and others, the need for sales representatives who meet clients on the road becomes dicey.
The good news here, especially if you are directly affected by this, is there are many other ways to generate an income, regardless of your education, background or experience. Be you a hotel housekeeper, maitre d’ or a highly paid company representative or pilot, you can learn about these programs and get a head start preparing for the new normal, which could put your current job in peril.
To learn about one of the best of these programs, message me.
Transportation and hospitality are getting hammered by the pandemic. They will have to adjust to encourage, perhaps, more leisure travel. Perhaps they can create scenarios in which people who are doing their jobs remotely can do them from , say, a nice beach or mountain locale, rather than from a cramped city apartment or suburban house.
It will require some innovation and imagination, but it can be done.
Meanwhile, the working person may have to adjust as well. Those folks may have to use their imaginations to examine different ways to earn an income.
Remember, too, that any kind of government aid will be temporary. It will be up to each person to come up with a more permanent solution to his or her own situation. That person will need to find something that he or she can do during and after the pandemic, that will keep going when the next pandemic comes.
Peter