“Purposeful” Is The New Business Travel Buzzword

by Robert McGarvey

I almost spit up a sip of coffee when I clicked on a piece by Richard Tams in Business Traveller and saw this: “There’s a new buzzword doing the rounds in business travel circles and it’s ‘purposeful’. According to those in the know, we should all be bracing for ‘an era of purposeful business travel’.

The applause you hear are mine. I’ve been preaching a similar doctrine for some time because, really, the time is ripe for a shift in attitudes towards business travel.

And, yes, I think a lot of business travel has been without purpose.  I can’t tell you how often I have traveled great distances to attend meetings where, very soon, I realized I had nothing to contribute and wouldn’t learn anything and so my attendance was purposeless.

But now companies – recoiling from the ever higher costs of airfare and hotels – want to trim travel expenses but they want to do it without impacting the bottomline. Note, too. Travel expenses really are up – 9% year on year per NerdWallet but airfare is up 26%.

Consider cost cutting as the first leg of a proverbial three legged stool. Eliminate purposeless travel and that is easy savings.

The second leg is the generational shift in business travel where millennials – unlike Baby Boomers, my generation, who have obediently kept a travel bag ever packed – now are carrying the bulk of the travel load and they question just about every trip. Why am I going? Am I needed? And of course what’s my purpose? Millennials just are shouting hell, no, I won’t go when they are instructed to fly to Cleveland for a meeting that could just as well be via Zoom.

A third leg of this stool is the corporate push for more environmentally sensitive travel which necessarily means less purposeless travel.  

Put those three trends together and, suddenly, the focus is on funding travel that is purposive. And funding only that travel.

What’s that? It isn’t travel that brings the traveler near to elite status.  Nor is it likely often to be travel to “show face.”

What it is, says Tams, is travel that genuinely supports the business and its interests. He elaborated: “The new model is designed to analyse trips by type and determine what purposeful travel means to your organisation.”

He went on: “Purposeful travel will mean different things to every company.”

Right there is the rub. Every organization needs to do a deep rethink about when travel is justified, for whom, and there won’t be and can’t be a common playbook.

A starting point in my mind is to look at last year’s travel – or maybe just last quarter’s in an organization with a heavy travel schedule – and ask what was the benefit of this trip? Could we have gotten it without any travel?

Extend the analysis to every employee who made the trip.  Junior staff, for instance, may genuinely benefit from attending meetings with very senior peers – I know I did when I was in my twenties and attended many meetings where most attendees were more than twice my age and held upper middle management or lower senior management jobs at Fortune 100 companies.  

Nowadays, however, I won’t attend a meeting unless I am going to serve an active role.

Companies won’t want me to attend unless my presence serves a measurable presence because that is their money wasted if I don’t.

Your turn: What does purposeful travel mean to you? To your organization? Your definition will differ from mine.

Also, note, purposeful travel does not always have to have a sales component. At some companies – you probably know the ones I mean – almost certainly most trips will involve selling but these companies have lived that way for a quarter century or longer.  But most organizations will bring a wider definition of purposeful to their analysis.

My guess is that in 2023 – where earnings and revenues will be flat in most organizations – we will see a rigorous application of the purposeful test for travel. A lot of trips will be nixed. As corporate economies get healthier in 2024, more trips will slip through the purpose net and get approved.

That’s when there needs be a reminder that costs and money are just one of three tests. There still are the issues of the environment and the generational shift.

Bottomline: business travel almost certainly isn’t returning to 2019 levels this year but what is cut won’t be missed. It’s in 2024-2025 where we will see if purposeful has become a word that organizations live by in travel planning. Or it was just another puff of meaningless air.