Bleisure Travel: What to Expect from a Business Trip

As Forbes states, Bleisure travel is the way to making the most out of business trips. And for a good reason. The Bleisure traveller is a new hybrid traveler: the business man or woman who is looking to have a little fun, whether it be sightseeing, museum (or bar) hopping, or music bopping, while working a little too. Yes, bleisure is the new leisure.

Younger generations are starting to see business traveling as a perk when it can be turned into a bleisure experience that allow them to discover new destinations while taking advantage of their business trip.

Expedia Media Solutions tracked 148-volunteer case study traveler group, who highlighted two points:

• Activities, attractions, and events are travelers top considerations when deciding to go from strictly business to bleisure.
• These potential bleisurers (coined!) visit event information websites and apps before booking their flights. OTA’s came in second to these sources.

This means that not only is content key, but its availability needs to prior to flight, and it needs to easy to find, navigate and make real itineraries with to turn biz. into leisure. When do travelers finally book flights? About 1-4 weeks in advance, an ample time-frame to provide rich dynamic destination content. It’s all about the timing.

Expedia also tracked a volunteer group of 4,880 travelers to go deeper into this bleisure trend and here are the key findings broken down into Motivators, Timing and Devices:

Motivators: what motivates one to become a bleisurer?

• Trip location: are there beaches? any interesting activities? what about sightseeing? any art shows or concerts? The more dynamic appeal, the more bleisure friendly.
• Trip time: closer to the weekend, the better (who doesn’t like a little weekend fun?). If it’s international, more likely to go bleisure over domestic!
• Trip duration: conferences have a 43% higher chance of turning into bleisure as opposed to pure sales trips (9%). Why? Well the latter are longer. Turns out the likelihood of bleisure is proportional to the number of travel days: the more days the better.
• Trip nature: remember the biz. part of the trip is covered by the boss, so this hybrid traveler is motivated to spend good cash on their own fun, knowing the plane, hotel and food bills are paid.

Timing: at what times do potential bleisurers look for dynamic content?

• At work: 39% of the study visited bleisure sites between 9am-3pm. Nothing better to escape the daily grind than to imagine yourself on a far-away beach. Or, maybe just looking at all the interesting things to do while you close that deal in Rome.
• In the evening: 25% of the study visited bleisure sites from 8pm-11pm. Hopefully the potential bleisurer is not working until 11pm, but if they are, you bet they are looking at fun things their next business trip destination has to offer. Or, maybe they are doing the typical evening travel-envisioning dream exercise (guilty).
• Mondays are great, Thursdays not so much, and Fridays good again: travel sites are heavily visited during the week (one-third on Monday, dip on Thursday then spike again on Fridays).
• On-site: ⅓ of respondents said that their decision to extend the trip depended on if there was an interesting event going on nearby.

Devices: how are the bleisurers accessing and viewing content?

• PCs and desktops are still the top choice, to see all those beautiful images of beaches, old alleyways, and more beaches.
• Mobile APPs come in second, always practical and on-hand.

Now that you know what’s buzzing in the bleisure mind, let us help you get that buzz to you!

In addition to this Expedia Research, we recently performed another study about Trip Planning preferences where we found out that 80% of business travelers would extend their trip if they knew what to do at the destination. Revealing, right?

5 Ways you can offer the perfect ‘Bleisure‘ experience:

1. Offer an all-in-one automated travel platform that allow your Business travellers to easily access everything from their mobile: book flight and hotels, check travel policies, itineraries, etc.
2. Have a flexible travel policy that allow employees to choose when they want to travel or even where they want to stay. 
3. Provide recommendations and bleisure-friendly plans based on their schedule and interests. Best rooftop bars in London, Top 5 Afterwork parties in Berlin, What you cannot miss in Paris, The perfect restaurants to eat like a local, etc. 
4. Apart from your own recommendations, keep the employees up-to-date with all the events taking place during their trip dates. You never know if there is a Jazz concert near their hotel that they don’t want to miss!
5. Bleisure travellers will be happier and more productive employees!