Business Travelers Pack Their Bags

Our Freight Transportation & Airlines Analyst discusses the key takeaways from his mid-year corporate travel survey, which includes a number of positive trends for the second half of 2024.

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Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I’m Ravi Shanker, Morgan Stanley’s Freight Transportation and Airlines analyst. Along with my colleagues bringing you a variety of perspectives, today I’ll discuss my expectations for corporate travel in the second half of this year.

It’s Thursday, July 11th, at 10am in New York.

More and more business travelers are packing their bags and taking a flight for business meetings. In fact, our corporate travel survey suggests that a record 50 percent of respondents marked their travel itineraries as returning to pre-COVID levels. As well, corporate travel budgets are expected to be up five to seven percent year-over-year in 2024, and about six percent in 2025. This means significantly more flights, hotels and car bookings for corporate travel.

Interestingly, this is the first survey since 2021 that larger enterprises were more optimistic on corporate travel demand compared to smaller enterprises.

The shift to virtual meetings over the next two years will likely be stable. Companies continue to predict that 12-13 percent of travel volume will be replaced by virtual meetings in 2024 and 2025. Looking ahead, respondents expect this level to hold through 2025, supporting some level of permanent shift we think.

For US airlines specifically, we have started to see more signs of life within the corporate space. Several US airlines are pointing to noticeable improvement in the first quarter after fairly stagnant volumes at the end of 2023. We also saw a reversal from prior surveys with larger corporations recovering faster than smaller enterprises, which had initially led the post-COVID recovery.

This positive trend in airline demand is supportive of our attractive view on US aerospace, as well. Even though global air traffic has already reached pre-COVID-19 levels, it is still about 32 percent below where the trendline would have been if COVID-19 had not happened, which leaves more room for growth.

For business aviation, private jet use should remain strong and stable as a large majority of survey participants are not planning to change their business jet travel. Higher interest rates and a potentially slowing economy could lead to a potential slowdown in business jet demand, but this hasn’t happened so far as there continues to be limited excess capacity in the industry as well as continued strong demand for aircraft.

Our colleagues in Europe note that although near-term indicators are positive, 40 percent of European respondents now do not expect corporate travel volumes to return to 2019 levels. This is concerning for the longer-term prospects of European corporate demand growth, which appears to be weaker than US growth.

Whether you're flying private jets or commercial, or choosing to keep your team meetings virtual, we'll continue to monitor corporate travel trends, and let you know of any updates to those flight manifests.

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