Many
travel managers have allowed travellers to upgrade their cabin class on flights in order to reduce risk in cases where
business trips have been permitted during the pandemic, according to research
released today. The upgrades were permitted so that travellers could comply with social distancing requirements.
An
Egencia study of 19,000 existing travel policies and 5,000 new policies between
October 2020 and February 2021 showed that 60 per cent of policy changes during
the period related to air travel.
As
well as allowing upgrades, corporate travel managers were also making changes
to advance purchase timescales, with many reducing the number of advance
purchase days required by their employees to help them navigate the rapidly
evolving travel landscape and reflecting the need to change plans last minute because of Covid-19.
The
changes made to hotel policies, 60 per cent related to hotel rate caps, providing
a degree of flexibility on hotel room rates in light of the pandemic.
A
further 40 per cent of changes within hotel policy focused on out-of-policy
locations, in order to prevent employees staying in potential Covid-19
hotspots.
“Our
data clearly shows that organisations are proactively changing their air, hotel
and rail policies to adapt to a highly fluid travel environment,” said Francisca
Zanoguera, vice president of data and analytics at Egencia. “It’s more evidence
that duty of care is a top priority for companies as business travel ramps up
and travel managers plan their organisation's business travel strategy.”