A coalition of business and travel industry leaders advocates a return to business travel in the United States, stating that doing so would accelerate the country’s economic recovery and create jobs.
Health protocols and policies put in place by the travel and event industry make meetings, conferences, exhibitions and events safe, according to representatives of the Let’s Meet There Coalition, the U.S. Travel Association, and the Exhibitions and Conferences Alliance, which sponsored an event at the National Press Club in Washington on Wednesday.
“The science and evidence clearly says that travel for professional meetings, events, exhibitions, tradeshows and conferences can and has safely resumed and doing so will greatly accelerate America’s economic recovery and will get businesses moving in a profitable way once again,” Roger Dow, president and CEO of the U.S. Travel Association, said. “After 18 months of conducting business virtually, the time has come to refill the well of professional relationships, engage with clients and colleagues in as safe an environment as possible, make deals and bring success to business that cascades down into all of our communities.”
The business travel industry accounts for $270 billion of the U.S. economy, according to Dow. Analysis of the business tourism industry by Tourism Economics found that domestic business travel supported 4 million U.S. jobs in 2019. However, business travel decreased by 68 percent in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and is expected to take as long as three years to rebuild.
Adam Sacks, president of Tourism Economics, an Oxford Economics company, said that within the past few months, businesses have shown less intention to travel than over the summer. In July, some 68 percent of businesses expressed an intense desire for business travel, while in August, only 35 percent have shown the same, he said.
But traveling is good for business, he noted. Tourism Economics studied 14 industries over 26 years and found a correlation between corporate performance and business travel.
“On a revenue basis, for every dollar invested in business travel, (businesses) saw a return of $5.90 on their top line. On their bottom line, the average return was $5.00 for every $1 invested in business travel,” Sacks said. “We went further in the analysis and said when you invest in business travel you actually have to increase capacity and wages. Once you net that out, still you’re getting $1.60 back out of every $1 invested.”
John Cordier, CEO of Epistemix Inc., said more than 300 business events have safely happened so far this year.
Epistemix found that the risk of infection at events are as much as eight times less than within the local community where the events were being held, and that events have not been shown to be “super-spreader” events. The company attributed that to the fact that attendees at in-person events have higher COVID-19 vaccination rates, at about 80 percent, than the overall population. Additionally, the air quality of indoor events in many hotels and convention centers is extremely high, as many event spaces have upgraded their HVAC systems.
Conventions, exhibitions and events are important not just to large corporations though, said Hervé Sedky, CEO of Emerald, a leading business-to-business exhibitions organizer. As a representative of the conference and exhibitions industry, Sedky said business events like conferences and exhibitions impact small businesses too.
“Of course, everyone understands the importance of our sector on the economy in that, we hire a lot of people, we hire a lot of contractors, we hire a lot of union labor…, but even more importantly, 80-plus percent of our customers are small businesses,” he said. “That is really critical to the reopening of the economy. Small businesses cannot afford to have a distributed sales and marketing organization and do the sorts of things that large businesses do. They rely on trade shows. As a matter of fact, in the United States, 46 percent of small businesses attend at least one trade show or exhibition at least once per year. Ninety-plus percent of them say it is an extraordinarily effective tool for them to get leads, to share their products and to market their brands.”
Tools like the CLEAR Health Pass make business travel seamless by providing a way for event attendees and employees to verify their health status at professional events, while protecting their privacy. The free, mobile CLEAR app securely connects a person’s identity with their proof of vaccination and test results in a contact-free format.
Dow of the U.S. Travel Association said resuming traveling for business would help the United States get back to normal.
“In order to bring back all travel spending and jobs that were lost to the pandemic, we’re going to need to bring back business travel, especially large, in-person professional meetings, exhibitions and events,” Dow said in closing. “Ultimately, it will be leaders in the business community who can and should usher in a return to economic normalcy by getting back on the road for business travel.”