One word trending in the business and startup world at the moment is bleisure. It’s not just celebrity couples that are victim to the blending of names and words. The business and tourism industry are the latest to fall victim.
But are bleisure trips really that popular, and are they new? Recent research carried out by Catalin Ciobanu and published in HBR set out to see firstly whether people really did tie in holidays and business trips, and secondly whether so called bleisure trips are a new trend or just a new name.
The research found that in 2015 one-fifth of business travellers checked time onto their business trips and in total 7 per cent of all business trips fit the profile of a bleisure trip.
However whilst the results show that a large number of people are holidaying and working the results showed that the so called bleisure trips are not a new thing. The results showed that there was no significant growth in these travel profiles of the last five years.
On average individuals take around 1.4 bleisure trips a year and interestingly as business travel increases the number of leisure trips that individuals take doesn’t rise in line with the trips that people take.
The data shows that millenials are taking the most leisure time when traveling for business, but in fact they aren’t. Instead they are travelling the least in general so when away for business they are more likely to tag time onto the end.
The data also shows, unsurprisingly, that the further you travel the more likely you are to extend your stay.
But why is the research important?
Catalin Ciobanu said: ‘Hospitality and destination management professionals can use data like this to better anticipate and meet the needs of business travelers. Beyond these results, for instance, this method can be used to analyze bleisure volumes by week of the year and route, or to map the relationship between bleisure and different types of events taking place at a destination.”
In short businesses need to take business travellers behavior and the trend whilst might not be new, looks as though it is here to stay.