Utrecht-headquartered travel management company BCD Travel
will cut more than 3,000 jobs from its 14,000-strong global workforce,
according to an interview with founder John Fentener van Vlissingen (pictured above) in the Dutch
newspaper Het
Financieele Dagblad.
He said that the redundancies would come at all levels and
that 700 people over the age of 55 and with more than 25 years of service had
taken a severance package offered by the company in the US, its biggest market.
Van Vlissingen believes it will
take five years for business travel sales to return to 2019 levels, when the company posted sales of
US$27.5 billion. He told the paper, “The recovery will take longer than we
thought. The virus is something we still have to take into account for a large
part of next year. Once there is a vaccine, it does not stop.
He said that when the business travel market does return it
will be different.
“More people will work from home, there will be more video
conferencing. But when Coca-Cola and Pepsi compete for an assignment in
Singapore, the job goes to the company that goes there,” he told the paper.
The company has taken funding from the Main Street Lending
Program operated by the US Federal Reserve for small
and medium-sized businesses to aid with liquidity.
In the most recent listing of the 50 largest TMCs in the UK,
BCD Travel came in at number
four with gross business travel sales of £694 million.
The company recently announced it had expanded its global footprint with German conglomerate Siemens and had consolidated its European leadership team under UK and Ireland boss Mike Walley.