Such a large, broad-based reduction in travel spending not only suggests a sluggish and potentially drawn-out recovery for the travel, accommodation, and transportation industries, but it also indicates that companies expect to shift from face-to-face meetings to lower-cost virtual meetings. And that’s exactly what we found when we asked companies about the share of virtual meetings they held in 2019 versus the share they anticipate holding in a post-COVID-19 world.
After the pandemic ends, companies anticipate conducting roughly half of all meetings with external clients, customers, patients, and suppliers by videoconference. Said another way, they expect the share of virtual meetings to triple relative to pre-pandemic averages.
The coronavirus pandemic is reshaping the economic landscape in myriad ways. Business travel appears to be front and center in this transformation.
Move over, jet lag—here comes Zoom fatigue.
This article is adapted from a post by the authors that appeared on the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s macroblog.
David Altig is executive vice president and research director at the Atlanta Fed. Jose Maria Barrero is assistant professor of finance at Mexico Autonomous Institute of Technology, Nick Bloom is the William D. Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford, and Steven J. Davis is the William H. Abbott Professor of International Business and Economics at Chicago Booth and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Brent Meyer is a policy advisor and economist at the Atlanta Fed. Emil Mihaylov is a research analyst at the Atlanta Fed. Nick Parker is the Atlanta Fed’s director of surveys.