Hybrid business/leisure trips boom as travellers mix work and play

“Business or pleasure?” is an age-old question – and for airline passengers these days, the answer increasingly is “both”.

The growth in so-called ‘bleisure’ trips blending personal getaways with remote work has helped fill seats on planes during the coronavirus pandemic and marks a shift in travel patterns for an industry used to clear divisions between briefcase-toting road warriors and sun-tanned vacationers.

Such excursions have been on the rise as the spread of the omicron variant has delayed the return to offices, especially among larger employers.

The share of business trips that include a weekend has increased 23 percentage points to 38% since 2019, according to corporate travel manager TripActions.

“Many of our customers that we’ve historically called leisure travelers are actually flying for reasons beyond just vacation,” American Airlines President Robert Isom said on a conference call Thursday.

“They may travel to a beach or a mountain destination, but they’re actually going to work remotely for the week. The lines between leisure and business travel are definitely blurred.”

How ‘bleisure’ blurs the lines

In response to the growing demand, TripActions added a dedicated personal trip booking platform in 2020. It averaged 22% monthly growth last year, said Kelly Soderlund, TripActions’ senior director of communications.

A plunge in traditional business travel during the pandemic has hurt the bottom line of carriers that count on large corporate customers as a key source of profit.

Their absence has been felt most deeply on international routes, as well as key cross-country travel corridors like New York to Los Angeles. Overall business travel bookings are 66% below pre-pandemic levels, according to industry trade group Airlines for America.

But the boom in combined business/leisure trips has helped make up for some of that lost traffic.

American says the blended trips often are booked at the last minute and carry a higher fare. The airline also saves on marketing expenses and has found that people making such excursions tend to fork over the cash for a better level of service.

Meaningful upside

United Airlines is generating a record amount of revenue from selling premium seats to leisure customers, Chief Commercial Officer Andrew Nocella said on a conference call Thursday. The trend “represents a meaningful amount of potential upside” to the carrier’s revenue plans, he said.

Even as Big Business remains cautious about travel for work, domestic trips taken by employees of small- and medium-sized enterprises have rebounded sharply – with more of those now including added time for leisure.

Bleisure travelers are increasingly flying on Thursday, joining business passengers who historically have made that the biggest travel day of the week. That allows them to work Friday and move into the weekend sooner, according to Vasu Raja, American’s chief revenue officer.

“As we go through the pandemic, customers have a lot more flexibility with their time,” Raja said.