Corporate Travel Analysis Reports For Europe/MEA

The loss of high-yielding business travel has been a significant blow for the traditional full-service carriers like Lufthansa and the other national carriers that sit within the Lufthansa Group. Corporate demand has been an essential ingredient within the group's business mix for some time, but its chief executive Carsten Spohr has remained confident of a recovery and revised business strategy helping to manage the situation.

Many of us would not have heard of SunExpress, a leisure airline and joint venture between Lufthansa and Turkish Airlines? But its chief commercial officer, Peter Glade, believes it is among the principals of industry transformation. Since his arrival at the carrier from Austrian Airlines in early 2016 he has made it his mission to drive innovation and remove the sometimes old fashioned processes of leisure travel and increase revenues and lower cost through new partnerships.

Travellers in the United States of America, United Kingdom and Australia will not be accepting of dropped standards in their hotel accommodation, in spite of the challenges faced by the hotel industry over the past year, new research by SiteMinder, the open hotel commerce platform, has found.

Across 2021, airline CEOs from all parts of the world have spoken openly at the monthly CAPA Live virtual summit about air travel, the coronavirus crisis and the path to recovery. To say 2020 and 2021 have been a challenge for these professionals is a major understatement and each shares the journey for their respective airlines through one of the biggest crises to hit the world.

Even though the COVID pandemic is far from over, vaccination progress and low incidence rates in certain parts of the world are encouraging more travel. Leisure and VFR - as expected - have led the way, but business travel is following, especially in large markets such as China and USA where domestic volumes are rising fast. The data from China in particular gives additional cause for hope.

The world is a very different place today than it was 18 months ago before when the coronavirus pandemic was in its infancy. That is clearly visible in the latest 2021 edition of Brand Finance's Airlines 50, a report on the most valuable and strongest airline brands which shows the total value of the world's top 50 most valuable airline brands has declined by a third since last year's report.

The surprise, in an unimaginably dreadful year, where international capacity fell to around one tenth of its previous level and many domestic operations fared only slightly better, was that so few airlines went out of business in 2020. Only around 30, out of a total of thousands collapsed or entered bankruptcy of one kind or another. In fact, a similar number - or even more - new start-ups have emerged with ambitions to use the dreadful circumstances to launch with a clean slate and importantly without legacy costs.

Almost a year and a half into the pandemic, the best and worst places to be in the COVID-19 era are increasingly defined by one thing, according to Bloomberg: "normalisation" as what has been the biggest vaccination drive in history of the world slowly enabling countries to relax restrictions and dismantle the border blocks that have drained the life out of the travel and tourism and hospitality sectors.

Improvements in vaccination rates and the introduction of the EU Digital COVID Certificate is providing hope for a tourism rebound in Europe over the summer months with intra-European trips expected to account for over 80% of Europe's travel in 2021.

Emirates Airline has re-opened its dedicated first class lounge at Dubai International airport's Concourse B to serve the growing volume of premium customers travelling from and through Emirates' hub, as more markets around the world ease restrictions and put in place protocols that enable international travel. The news supports a positive trend in the slow recovery of corporate travel.