About three-quarters of corporate travel buyers and procurement professionals surveyed this month by the Global Business Travel Association in Europe predict their organisations will resume non-essential domestic business travel sometime this year, if they haven't already.
Around 56 per cent of the approximately 70 respondents to the GBTA survey, which was conducted online between 8 and 13 March, indicated they believe their organisations will restart such travel in the second half of 2021, with about 38 per cent projecting no restart until 2022. About 7 per cent indicated such travel already has restarted.
The survey is the latest in a series of monthly polls GBTA has conducted of its membership to gauge Covid-19 recovery sentiment. About 52 per cent of travel manager respondents in the March poll indicated their travellers were "somewhat willing" or "very willing" to travel for business, the same figure as in its February poll, but the share of respondents who said travelers were "very willing" increased to 10 per cent from 4 per cent.
Meanwhile, GBTA for the first time asked respondents their opinion on digital health passports, the efforts by several organisations and governments to develop secure apps with which travellers can demonstrate to airlines and border officials their Covid-19 testing and vaccination status.
Around 72 per cent of respondents expressed that the use of such passports to help "open up travel and eliminate the need for mandated quarantine and multiple tests" was good policy, with around one in nine indicating it was bad policy. Two thirds of those who thought the passports were bad policy noted that countries that do not issue such passports would be punished should they become a standard while three out of five cited data-privacy concerns.