Combining business and leisure travel is not a new phenomenon—we were gifted the portmanteau ‘bleisure’ back in 2009—but in the post-pandemic era of remote work and travel-starved employees seeking greater work-life balance, bleisure travel has been given a new lease on life.
A 2022 industry poll conducted by the Global Business Travel Association found that two in five travel managers (41 percent) reported an increase in the desire for blended or bleisure travel among employees.
One estimate holds that in 2022 blended travel had a market value of $497.5 billion, and some experts insist that providing support for bleisure travel can be an important tool in attracting and retaining talent.
What does this mean for travel managers? And is there value in thinking beyond business travel for a managed travel program?
Salesforce senior director of global travel Dorian Stonie is a long-time believer in the value of bleisure and has integrated leisure travel as part of the software company’s managed travel program “from day one.”
“We wanted to leverage not just our corporate travel spend, but all the travel activity within our community … so we started partnering with our suppliers on how to extend discounts, benefits and services to the personal side of travel,” he explained.
Stonie said the added leisure volume “makes us a more multifaceted account” for suppliers and has enabled Salesforce to negotiate better corporate rates.
“[The program] has been very well received, especially among our younger employees,” he said. “And when it comes to travel policy, we allow personal extensions or bleisure so long as it does not add any additional cost to the trip, and if it does, the expectation is the employee will then break out any of those additional expenses.”
Salesforce currently has more than 20,000 travelers in its ‘Road Warriors’ community, which has “one of the most interactive Slack channels in the company,” where conversations traverse both business and leisure travel, he said.
The added personal benefits for travelers also have driven greater policy compliance and has proven to be an important factor in both attracting and retaining employees.
Post-pandemic, Stonie said the company’s business travel patterns are “evolving.” Business travel volume is down compared with 2019, unsurprisingly, but the average length of stay has increased, due to a combination of “purposeful travel”—folding multiple trips into one—and personal extensions, according to Stonie.
Even travel managers with smaller-scale programs are finding value in harnessing leisure and blended travel.
Tracie Saunders, director of business operations at HR consulting firm Segal, manages a travel program with some 300 travelers, 75 of whom are frequent travelers. She said incentivizing her employees to access corporate discounts for their personal travel, and extending supplier benefits via loyalty program memberships helps to drive compliance and discourage leakage.