Blended business and leisure travel top tourism growth opportunity

Corporate visits of 19% outstrip growth of 11% for those leisure ones

Business travel has defied post-pandemic expectations and when extended with leisure now represents the biggest opportunity for tourism growth, according to new research.

More than half of experts responding to Tourism Economics’ Travel Industry Monitor 2024 survey for the WTM Global Travel Report cited blended leisure and business travel as a tourism growth opportunity, making it the top niche mentioned.

Business travel’s performance has been ‘something of a surprise relative to prior expectations,’ the report notes. The post-pandemic persistence of online meetings and events was expected to cause its decline.   

Instead, in-person meets are ‘still highly valued and business overnights and spending have surpassed previous peaks’. The report notes business travel is being built largely around business events.

Annual growth in business visits of around 19% in 2024 outstrips growth of around 11% for leisure visits according to Tourism Economics.

Though business travel’s growth is expected to slow somewhat to around 17% in 2025, over the period 2024 to 2030 such visits are predicted to grow by around 50% against a growth in leisure visits of a little under 30% for the same period.

Significantly, business travellers are staying longer and spending more per trip. While the volume of international business visits currently remains 6% below pre-pandemic levels, the number of overnights is 3% above that 2019 benchmark.

Such extended visits are partly thanks to the trend for ‘bleisure’ - the combining of business trips with extra days of leisure tourism. In this respect remote working has had a positive effect the report notes, enabling travellers to be more flexible about working overseas around their leisure time.

However pure leisure travel, which is also seeing extending lengths of stay, remains by a large margin the most important travel segment in terms of volume and spending, comprising 69% of arrivals and 80% of global travel spending.

Juliette Losardo, exhibition director for WTM London added: “Using an expansive databank covering more than 185 countries worldwide as destinations and as origin markets, covering all major bilateral tourism flows in terms of visits, nights and spend, as well as unique industry insights, the report gives a comprehensive outlook on tourism.”