At a media reception with executives from Hilton during the Global Business Travel Association Convention 2024 in Atlanta, the new Hilton for Business travel program was discussed — as well as the growing difference between leisure travel on a business trip and a workcation.
The Difference Between Leisure Travel On a Business Trip and a “Workcation”
The media reception included a roundtable discussion — as well as a session with questions and answers.
Christiane Cabot Bini — who is the vice president of global business travel sales at Hilton — described leisure travel on a business trip as when a person who spends several days conducting business on a trip wants to add more time for leisure on the same trip, with the average length of a stay growing by 1.5 days. For example, a person who travels to Thailand on a business trip may want to spend a few days exploring the country as a leisure traveler and not have to be concerned about conducting business. Doing so saves the person hundreds of dollars on airfare and valuable hours on traveling back to Thailand for a purely leisure trip.
Thanks to technology, a workcation is becoming more differentiated than simply adding leisure travel to the beginning or the end of a business trip in that a person designs a trip with working remotely in mind — which means that time is set aside conducting business while on an otherwise leisure trip.
Although corporate clients are important, approximately 85 percent of the volume of business travel to which Hilton caters is comprised of small businesses and medium-sized businesses. One significant focus of the Hilton for Business travel program is to have the owner of a small business or a medium-sized business join the program — and then have their employees book their hotel reservations at a hotel or resort property that is a brand of Hilton so that the company can earn discounts and rewards. This has led to the growth of the Hilton Honors membership program to surpass 190 million members, with thousands of people joining the program as members on a daily basis. Hilton Honors is the fastest growing lodging membership program in the world, according to Frank Passanante, who is the senior vice president and global head of sales for Hilton.
Final Boarding Call
Back in the days when I was in the corporate world, I almost always added several extra days to my business trips. Not only did doing so cost the company for which I worked no extra money; but the practice often saved the company money because a trip would be extended over a weekend — and rates were usually lower for both lodging and airfare as a result when a stay over a Saturday night was included. One of countless examples of my experiences is when I went to the Gilroy Garlic Festival in California — and, thankfully, I attended the festival after the business portion of my trip for obvious reasons. The situation was a win for me, a win for the company for which I worked, a win for each of the travel companies which I patronized, and a win for the places I visited on my own time.
I technically have increasingly engaged in the workcation model of travel where I plan a trip for leisure purposes but incorporated conducting business on a remote basis — again, thanks to technology that increasingly improves on a continuous bases; and thanks also to the ever-expanding availability of free access to Wi-Fi networks.
Please include your thoughts in the Comments section below on how you engage in leisure travel on a business trip or a workcation — or both…
All photographs ©2022 and ©2024 by Brian Cohen.
