Duty of care and traveller risk have fallen off travel buyers' radars according to research carried out for the Business Travel Show.
The subjects have been top of mind for the past two years, taking the number two slot, but have dropped out of the list of top ten concerns for buyers, according to the survey of 134 European travel buyers.
The findings come a few weeks after Ipsos MORI revealed in its Business Resilience Trends Watch 2019 that a smaller number of business decision makers (47% compared to 63%) believed that travel risks had increased.
Cost-cutting, which has been buyers' main concern for the past three years according to the annual survey carried out for the February event, has also been replaced as the principal concern by a more pressing one — Brexit.
The problem for buyers, like everyone else in the UK, is that what the country will look and feel like after March 2019 is anyone's guess. Despite Theresa May winning her no-confidence vote this week (albeit far from convincingly), no-one is any clearer of what our relationship with the European Union and the rest of the world will look like when — or perhaps if — separation occurs.
The survey also revealed that 65% of travel buyers have no post-Brexit plan in place.
Airbus UK travel manager Geoff Allwright said the researchers that Brexit is the one thing that "keeps him awake at night".
Business Travel Show group event director David Chapple said: "Whether for or against the UK leaving the European Union, the last few months have been particularly frustrating and baffling for both sides leaving everyone possibly even more uncertain about any potential outcomes than they were a year or two ago."
The results of the survey for this and the past five years are shown in this week's chart below.
