We’ve been coaching, cajoling, and cheering you business travelers on when it comes to tacking on some extra personal time before or after your work trip. And Expedia says you’re listening!
Expedia Group Media Solutions commissioned Luth Research to find out more about what you’re doing and how you’re making bleisure work for you. The study asked American, British, Chinese, German, and Indian bleisure travelers to share what influenced their decisions, what resources they used to make their decisions, and what their resulting preferences were after their experiences.
Here’s what they found out.
The first thing Expedia discovered is which group of you is taking advantage of this. Those of you who work in technology, IT, and software—you’re making this work for you once every two to three months after you’ve been on the road for a two-to three-day trip.
Next, Expedia found there’s been a dramatic increase in the number of business travelers taking a couple bleisure days: a 40 percent uptick over the same period in 2016. Sixty percent of business travelers reported turning your work travel into a vacation sometime in the reporting period between March 2017 and March 2018. Bravo!
The British Museum Great Court
While the largest percentage of business travel was to participate in a conference (67 percent), the leading factor in whether or not the destination was considered for bleisure wasn’t proximity to family and friends, but other factors such as the availability of great food, a beach, or the opportunity to check it off your bucket list. Way to multi-task!
Even the time and cost of the bleisure trip had an effect: 37% of respondents said the proximity of their trip to the weekend played a role in their decision; the same number of people said the additional costs of the trip helped them decide. That’s always a good strategy: if you can end a trip on Friday or even Thursday, why not stick around for a nice weekend away? (Or if you can manage it, end your trip on a Monday and then stick around for the rest of the week. We won’t tell.)
Among the most popular US bleisure destinations were New York, LA, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and San Francisco.
What are your bleisure travel habits? What do you do to turn your business travel into a little bit of fun? Share your ideas on our Facebook page, or on our Twitter page.
Photo credit: David Iliff, License: CC-BY-SA 3.0 (Wikimedia Commons)