Who's going to lead the recovery - the business traveller or the leisure traveller?

As the dust has settled on the close down process and company boards come to terms with new business terms such as furloughing, thoughts are starting to turn to the future. 

The process of planning for re-opening for business is getting underway. This is a complicated task and made all the more challenging due to the uncertainty of the demand environment we are going to emerge into. A key element of this uncertainty stems from the question of what type of demand will be fastest to return.

Taking our lessons from the past and the recovery from the global financial crisis in 2009, the expectation would be that leisure travel would be first to emerge and the recovery in corporate and event spending would take longer as companies repaired their balance sheets. 

However, as the post below shows, this time it may not be so simple. Decisions around personal health and safety will be at the fore in this recovery and companies overall will be very keen to get back to business as soon as they can.

This raises the prospect of a multi-faceted demand recovery environment. In the scenario suggested in this quote, immunity is developed and antibody testing is robust, you could see a rapid recovery in essential international business travel (large meetings and events may need to wait a while) whilst leisure travel is limited to more domestic activity. A vaccine would change the game again of course.

This uncertainty means that businesses need to be modelling multiple scenarios and understanding how differing demand environments would impact their re-opening program. It also means that you need to stay close to your various sales channels so that you can respond quickly to demand changes and not pin your hopes on any one channel on its own.