On the occasion of the 4thCorporate Travel Network organised at the beginning of October by Amadeus at its Sophia Antipolis centre, five professionals 'confessed' to taking advantage of the event and the destination to extend their business trip with a personal stay on the Côte d'Azur. Just five guests out of an audience of some 120 people, yet at the cutting edge of new 'business travel' trends, and above all in a sunny setting just a few minutes from the beach... Admittedly, this freehand photograph is not really a survey. It does, however, call into question the scale of a phenomenon that is regularly presented as the trend in business travel, the business travel in the 2010s...
The proportion of "bleisure" travellers in the Amadeus CTN 2014 will have surprised many a specialist
The Bleisure Report 2014 recently published by Bridgstreet sheds a completely different light on the phenomenon. Based on an international panel of some 640 international travellers, the long-stay accommodation specialist points out that a majority of professionals (60%) more or less regularly extend a business trip into a tourist stay. In 46% of cases, the practice is even almost systematic, with the majority of these bleisure travellers (54%) even inviting a member of their family to accompany them: a practice that is less prevalent in France than in other business travel markets.
Among the 40% of travellers 'not initiated' to bleisure - half of whom say they are interested in trying out this trend - 48.8% explain that they have no free time during a business trip, while 17.5% work during this free time. A mere 16.3% of travellers express no interest whatsoever in bleisure... These figures should be set against another statistic: the average length of a business trip, which varies greatly from one country to another. While 'express' trips (1-2 days) are in the majority in France and the UK, business travellers in Saudi Arabia (mostly 5 to 7 days) and especially in India (more than 14 days) enjoy experiences spread out over a longer period of time...
The Bleisure Report 2014 also highlights another crucial issue, pointing out that the company has very rarely taken up the issue. In the majority of cases (59%), business travellers indicate that their employer has no policy in place on this subject, while 27.3% of those surveyed are unaware of any. Only 13.7% of travellers said that their company had a policy on bleisure... It now remains to be seen how many of the 120 or so guests at this CTN 2014 had in fact hidden a swimming costume in their business suitcase, and how many will be converted to bleisure by the 2016 edition...
