Working hard or hardly working?

Combining business trips with sightseeing and leisure time is not a new phenomenon. Bleisure has been a buzzword for more than a decade, although it has gained extra currency during the post-lockdown travel recovery. Bleisure travel is strongly linked to enormous changes to the way we work, with some estimates suggesting that 15–20% of business travellers add on some leisure time to their stays. The majority of the US workforce, for example, now chooses to work from home, according to Pew Research Center.

Blending business with pleasure

With this rise of bleisure travellers, hotels can target this market by including leisure activities in their marketing to business segments. “We’re really ramping up our loyalty programme,” says Marc Dardenne, Accor’s chief operating officer luxury brands Europe. “It’s obviously a big incentive for business travellers to have a very effective loyalty programme and ours includes lots of experiences that you cannot buy – such as the chance to meet the Paris St. Germain football team.”

For David Orr, CEO of Resident Hotels, a group with six hotels in London and Liverpool, while a strong return of pure leisure travel was expected this spring and summer, he has been pleasantly surprised by the amount of group bookings for business get-togethers. These tend to be longer stays of two or three nights rather than the traditional single overnight business trip.

Bookings have come from entrepreneurial SMEs in the creative industries, rather than larger corporate clients who have been slower to start travelling again.

Part of Orr’s surprise might be due to the fact that none of his hotels have meeting rooms. Instead, Resident Hotels collaborates with nearby venue partners such as Searcys and the Institute of Directors to curate the itineraries that clients require. Orr has also noted a trend for work get-togethers to include leisure and social elements, such as a trip to a West End theatre or evenings spent in neighbourhood pubs and restaurants.

“After such a long hiatus, work events need to be more interesting. Energising people in an urban environment does feel like it’s part of the agenda,” he comments.

WFH

In many cases, WFH might just as easily stand for work-from-hotel rather than work-from-home. Hotel lobbies and public areas are often populated with people staring thoughtfully into laptops while sipping a coffee.

Dardenne, who looks after 40 luxury hotels across Europe under the Fairmont, Raffles and Sofitel brands, says: “In all our public spaces, we are seeing quite a lot of pick up from people who want to be in a nice atmosphere and who come into our lobbies to work. It adds life to the hotels and a bit of money, and we can engage with them. It’s opening up our hotels to the community and has been very positive.”

“Our lounges epitomise the teams welcome for guests whether hosting complimentary early evening drinks or being the pleasant setting for working in a more sociable space throughout the day,” Orr adds.

Co-working spaces

Other operators have taken a more deliberate approach to monetising the rise of flexible and remote working by targeting those who struggle with the logistics or isolation of working from home. Village Hotels, a brand with 33 UK properties, started offering co-working spaces in 2018. The brand provides a recurring revenue and brings more people into the hotels at times when overnight guests are usually out. This is good for increased ancillary spend in the group’s F&B, leisure and sport facilities.

Village’s co-working spaces are not only used by individuals and freelancers. Several companies have purchased substantial membership packages for their teams. At the group’s Leeds North hotel, the co-working membership is made up of employees from five different companies who have their own dedicated desks.

This is a great example of how hotels can take market share from established workspace providers like WeWork, ImpactHub and Regus by offering a professional environment that combines work and leisure facilities.

“Compared with other business centres, we have the advantage of having a leisure club, great food and beverage, a Starbucks, parking and hotel rooms on-site,” says Jamie Hunter, director of business development and VWorks at Village Hotels.

Flexible terms and conditions

Flexible terms and conditions will continue to be important to the bleisure traveller. As the threat of Covid-19 has receded in the US and Europe, understaffing in the airline industry has caused cancellations and delays, making air travel something of a gamble. The latest Expedia Traveller Value Index survey of 5,500 travellers reveals that flexibility, and the ability to receive a full refund or credit if plans change, remains a top priority for consumers.

“Flexibility and thoughtfulness are vital as our industry continues to experience uncertainty but with a tenacious spirit to curate outstanding guest experiences,” says Orr.

“We empathise and will respond should guests need to make changes during their stay, whether that is an extension of a trip, being joined by family or friends, or for business- focused activities.” Booking lead times could be very short during the pandemic, but now, according to Dardenne, this is changing. “During the Covid-19 crisis, we really relaxed all of our rules in terms of pre-bookings and provided lots of liberty to cancel. But now, occupancy is building up and people realise that they need to book ahead. Obviously it is in their interests as they get cheaper tickets because airline tickets have really gone up.”

Changes to services and infrastructure

Traditionally, hotels tended to have a core focus on either leisure or business travellers. There was always some overlap, but now there is a growing realisation that hotels can benefit from targeting ‘the whole guest’, for example, the guest who travels for both business and leisure. This new thinking is apparent in the changes hoteliers have made to their services and infrastructure to cater to a wider variety of traveller’s needs. For example, the 350-room Sofitel Dubai Downtown was among those hotels that used the downtime during the pandemic to convert some of its suites into apartments to target longer-stay guests. Resident Hotels has decided upon a business model that keeps communal areas to a minimum, with no meeting rooms and no breakfast served. Instead, each room has its own mini-kitchen and there is a grocery-delivery option for guests.

“Our guest rooms are set up for working from the hotel and longer stays, which can combine a bit of WFH with a bit of city cultural visitation; the mini kitchen is especially useful for ensuring everything is to hand,” comments Orr.

This business model keeps labour costs down and is possible due the vibrant locations of hotels with plenty of F&B and visitor attractions on their doorstep. Targeting the bleisure traveller, therefore, may require urban hotels to provide larger rooms and apartment-style conveniences, including other services such as laundry. For resorts in rural and coastal areas, there is the opportunity to attract digital nomads and bleisure travellers. This may require IT upgrades, however, particularly reliable high-speed internet and the provision of workspaces.

The future of business travel

The pandemic provoked plenty of speculation about the future of meeting, events and business travel, much of it gloomy. Hoteliers looked at their empty venues and began to wonder about when – and if – meetings and events would return.

For Dardenne, the bounce-back in business demand this year has been extremely welcome and somewhat surprising. “At one stage we really looked at our meeting facilities and we said: ‘What do we do with these ballrooms? Do we need to do something else?’ And then, all of a sudden, we had to push pause because business is actually coming back.”

Pent-up demand for face-to-face meetings and ‘revenge travel’ have been factors, notes Dardenne, adding that there has been almost no demand for hybrid (combining remote/digital and in-person) meetings and conferences so far this year.

He adds: “It’s interesting to see the big fair destinations: Munich, Frankfurt, Geneva. The thought was that the fairs are going to change. But I was just in Munich and all of the big fairs there are back to 2019 levels in terms of attendance.”

The optimist in us craves for the post-pandemic sugar rush to continue and for the ‘roaring twenties’ to blaze ahead. But could the peak of the recovery be already behind us? The macro-economic outlook is not positive, neither is the continuing disruption at airports.

“I think we will see a recalibration in September,” says Dardenne. Targeting local bleisure and WFH markets offers a way to compensate for the expected reductions in corporate travel.