Trip.com’s global data and a survey of Japanese companies show that business travel is shifting from “work only” to “work plus leisure,” with more travelers extending their personal stays and making personal bookings after business trips.
Business travel worldwide is shifting from a focus on work to bleisure, which combines business with personal time. Friday check-ins rose 26% year on year, personal bookings immediately after business trips increased 30%, and personal travel within 7 days after business trips rose 25%. Travelers who extend their stays after business trips add an average of 3.4 nights.
One factor encouraging travelers to extend their stays immediately after business trips is that 60% continue staying at the same hotel as during their business trip.
By city, Singapore ranked No. 1 globally by number of hotel bookings, up 30% YoY. Seoul saw weekday stays rise 67% and Friday check-ins increase 54%, while London recorded increases of 42% in weekday stays and 37% in Friday check-ins. In Southeast Asia, hotel bookings in Bac Ninh, Vietnam, rose sharply by 341% year on year.
Business travel volumes at Japanese companies are generally stable, with 71.7% of respondents reporting levels broadly unchanged from the previous year and 61.5% saying their business travel budgets were stable. At the same time, companies face challenges in obtaining a cross-functional view of bookings made outside managed channels, non-compliance with travel policies, billing discrepancies and unmeasured contract benefits, even where management infrastructure is in place.
The share of companies unable to measure contract benefits is 16.0%, more than 3 times the global average. Only 10% of companies can gain visibility into more than 80% of their overall business travel. Booking and billed amounts differ at 65.8% of companies, while 45.5% spend more than 6 hours a month reconciling bookings made without approval.
Data governance, a prerequisite for integrating and using business travel data across the organization with AI, is becoming increasingly important. Establishing management systems that cover bookings, changes, billing, expense settlement and contracts has emerged as a key challenge for the future.