Andrew Hogg from Teampay talks about the state of business travel today

Travel is back, baby

Andrew Hogg is the CEO of Teampay, a software company that helps companies manage and control what their employees spend. Teampay’s clients range from manufacturing to software and hardware companies, but most of them have been established in the last 15-20 years and are cloud-native with a strong technology suite and digital first approach. As such, Hoag has a unique edge over how much startups invest (or don’t) invest in business trips:

• The last three quarters have been the strongest in travel spending over the past few years, With a particularly strong recovery in February after a short dip in the December and January holidays. “A lot of CEOs feel as if the pendulum has swung a little too far from the entire remote control,” he said. “Humans are social creatures,” and it is easier to pick up on nonverbal cues and build a relationship in real life, Hoag says.
• Typically, about 5% of a company’s budgets are allocated to travel, and decreased to as much as 1 to 2% during the pandemic. Now, companies are in the 3-4% range.
• As spending on conferences and trade fairs increased again at the end of last year, Double in the last six months. Overall, Hoag said this spending is close to the same as 2019 levels.

This is all in line with what others in the corporate travel space are seeing:

• In China and the United Kingdom, the desire to travel rose by 2 points and 9 points respectively between October and February, according to a new poll by Morning Consult.
• Half of American adults surveyed by Harris Poll in January reported attending an in-person public event. in the previous three months. Only 38% reported attending a virtual event in the same period.
• Younger adults were more likely to attend in-person events, With 71% of Generation Z and 60% of Millennials telling Harris Poll they have, compared to 56% of Generation X and 34% of Baby Boomers.

Besides collecting data on how other companies change their relationship with travel, Hoag has been testing how Teampay employees travel internally:

• Before the pandemic, the company was entirely local and headquartered in New York. Since then, they’ve turned into hybrids, with people scattered across the country meeting once or twice a quarter in person to touch the base.
• In January, the company’s leadership wanted to work together in Mexico City and decided to open the trip to the entire company. Hoag gave everyone a fixed salary to work out of town for a week, covering meals, hotels and travel arrangements. A quarter of the company ended up gathering at WeWork there for that week.
• From a cost standpoint, Teampay’s office expenses are half of what they once were in the pre-pandemic period, so they simply reallocate savings toward this downturn. They are still spending less on additional corporate travel than they were spending on maintaining a full-time office.
• Although the benefit is hard to gauge, Hoag feels the Mexico trip was definitely worth it because the team members were able to build a relationship and “now work together in different ways.” He referred to a 30-minute whiteboard session with the company’s product manager, which they had previously been trying to solve via ten different amplifications with five different people. That 30-minute session “changed the way we think about our product roadmap.”
• The company plans to take a trip like this at least twice a year and maybe every three months.

However, the number of business travelers hit by the pandemic who say they will never take a business trip again has grown in multiple markets, according to the same Morning Consult poll. This could always be a slowdown, though my bet is that, like the whole discussion about going back to the office, we’ll eventually see a hybrid scenario rise to the top.

What is your opinion? Does all of this track how you feel about business travel and what you feel comfortable about at this point in the pandemic? Camping in Mexico City with your co-workers for a week? Let me know: [email protected].

Web3 is coming for electronic technology

My colleague Amber Burton has transitioned to the Electronic Tech Rhythm Program this month (send her congratulations and tips! [email protected].) and she’s already killing it. This week, I wrote about how enterprise-focused education technology is having a moment. Ed tech is, believe it or not, on the blockchain. Investors spent more than $2.1 billion on skills companies in the last year alone. Part of this has to do, of course, with the entire talent shortage. Because if you can’t hire, you can always try to retrain existing employees, improve their skills, and hone their skills. One company, 101, has launched something called “metaversity,” aimed at solving the skill adoption problem.

Read the full story.