The amount of money spent on business travel in 2021 was less than half of 2019, according to the Global Business Travel Association. Moreover, it is likely never to fully recover.
Forty percent of Americans who once frequently traveled for business say they never expect to do so again. Photo by Business Travel Panama.
According to a recent survey of Americans who once traveled for business at least three times a year, 40 percent say they never expect to travel for business again and 12 percent say they don’t expect to travel for at least the next year. In France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, the share who say they never expect to travel for business again is 50 percent or more. “Business travel will never return to a pre-pandemic normal,” concludes the survey.
This has profound implications for more than just the airlines. Prior to the pandemic, people whose jobs allowed them to work at home would often say they could live anywhere within an hour of a commercial airport and a good internet connection. Now the former requirement is no longer important, and with the rapid expansion of high-speed internet services the second requirement isn’t much of a limit either.
In Triumph of the City, Edward Glaeser argued that we still needed dense cities because of the face-to-face contacts they provided and that telecommunications would never be an adequate substitute for in-person contacts. There may be a few instances when this is still true, but the blooming of Zoom and its competitors during the pandemic has shown that it isn’t true for most cases.
This is just one more reason why we can expect to see big cities decline and smaller towns and exurban areas to grow. It also means spending more on mass transit and intercity rail makes no sense when fewer people will be in a position to need or use those services.
Thats GOVERNMENT. Building fear one sniffle at a time…….
Wikipedia …
Although his most recent book, Triumph of the City (2011), celebrates the city, he moved with his wife and children to the suburbs around 2006 because of “home interest deduction, highway infrastructure and local school systems”. He explained that this move is further “evidence of how public policy stacks the deck against cities. Because of all the good that comes out of city life—both personal and municipal—people should take a hard look at the policies that are driving residents into the suburbs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Glaeser
Note to historians: Prediction is hard — especially about the future.
The future is never predicted….only built or unbuilt.
remember chatting with the head of boston convention center during the pandemic, they hadn’t yet grappled with the fact that business travel may never return.
on retirement, we’ll be moving even deeper rural to escape the taxation they’ll try to lay to attempt to keep the city centered.
the exodus has yet to begin, imho.
Good from city life.
– rampant crime
– shitty schools
– inept politicians…legacy politicians
– degraded infrastructure
– traffic
– noise
NO NOT ALL citiesvare like that. Many small US TOWNS ARE pleasant. European cities and villages which Glasser wetdreams over
Imagine being so woke you have existential dread over a disease less lethal than flu……
Triumph of the Exurb has a nice ring to it.