It's unlikely business travel will ever be the same; environmental pressures aren't going to go away, neither are pressures to cut costs, in fact the latter will likely be the greater driver of the two, and businesses have discovered through home working that many meetings can be done without physical face to face contact. Of course there will still be the need for business travel, but so many meetings can be adequately completed online through Teams, Zoom etc. When I say adequately, I mean that in an ideal world there is no substitute for face to face, and I dislike Teams meetings intensely, but you can't take away from the fact that each one is achieved at lower financial cost, lower cost in time, and low environmental cost.

Switzerland to be considered carefully for possible inclusion on the quarantine list for England. It's already on the list for Scotland

I'm wondering however if Bulgaria might possibly get onto the UK's good list on Thurs 27 Aug or 03 Sep. Daily case count seems to be improving

So how much more money should not only this government borrow but other governments borrow to save aviation? Even if much of it fails due to this virus and household names disappeared there will always be new players coming out of nowhere to fill the gaps when opportunities arise while the survivors will emerge stronger with less competition.

Using Flybe at Southampton as an example. That airport was left with almost no routes when Flybe failed yet despite the pandemic other airlines are introducing replacement services for those more profitable routes.

Only 10 Countries worldwide don't have this virus installed in their territory and that's called containment,and we are still drawing up travel bans,quarantine,exemption's lists etc.quite remarkable really.Well my favourite so far is Switzerland to Scotland,Yes you can arrive in the UK and stay but stay out of Scotland,Absolutely brilliant.

It will be interesting to see whether the same happens at SEN following the loss of flyBE/Stobart Air and easyJet.....

Very true. Unless things change very quickly I can see some very big and long standing names disappearing. The result with be directors and senior managers putting together new, smaller niche players to fill the void. Over time some will fail, others will merge, and in 10 - 15 years passengers will face the same lack of choice they have now, certainly for IT passengers - supposing of course the IT doesn't whither away on the vine as new technologies that we haven't even thought of yet rise up. In the interim think 1970s and 1980s, and to cover the flying perhaps a number of smaller primarily charter airlines.

As regards airports, it has been said for years there are too many commercial airports, not particularly in UK but across Europe. I don't doubt that a few will wind up as housing estates and business parks over the next decade, a process expedited by the fallout from Covid-19.

Regarding business travel...

I'd like to ask people what percentage of recent business travel they believe was due to colleagues meeting up with colleagues vs people travelling to meet/see new clients for the first or second time? I think the former has only really been happening at the senior exec level for the last decade anyway (and it was increasing year on year despite major advances in video conferencing) and the latter is something that will be difficult to change even in a post Covid world.

Travel is a necessity if you want to woo a client. A physical meet and greet over lunch or dinner is essential for a business. I just can't see Agency Inc introducing themselves, their portfolio and their pricing model over MS Teams or Zoom to a new client. Theywill know that another service provider might gain an advantage just because of their physical presence and for that reason alone will not risk pitching their business remotely.

Definitely. But I'd also like to know the prospects for the international conference scene, and the proportion of travel in business class which is not really employers business purpose in the strict sense of the term. Like many things, there is a spectrum from very inelastic to somewhat elastic.

I am more pessimistic than you. Surely, to seal a multi-million deal a higher executive will probably go and visit the client, but some of the earlier meeting and proposals will surely continue to be done online, probably through Teams etc., and very likely from home. Two studies released today, one just surrounding UK and the other a global study suggests that the requirement for office space is going to fall considerably, and that will include meeting rooms.

I'm not sure when you were in business, you may still be and your sector somewhat different, but in my experience the "meet and greet" business lunch has, I suspect from in London, largely become a thing of the past. For the preceding 5 years up until I left my business roll in 2014 I didn't do one business lunch with a client, and they were frowned upon by the MD (Arkright!!) even back then.

CW247
I shuttle pretty constantly between UK and Germany on weekly basis normally. I am now tending to do 1 week UK /1 week Germany and can see that going on into the New Year. On top of this we have the LH travel to projects, and to meet clients. So far I have done two of these, both to the ME and I am looking to ramp up these as things start to ease / people learn to live with this virus. Though Bojo keeps throwing the proverbial spanner in the works with his quarantines and frequent changes. I can not say LH travel is so much fun as it used to be, and I find it very difficult to sleep with a mask on, so do arrive far more tired than I used to, especially on Red eye flights. I think, and I have said this in previous post some months ago, that people will get back to actually meeting people and looking at projects rather than Zooming, as the interaction is poor in my opinion in that format, and we are hearing about some big errors coming out of some of our competitors who have over relied on the Zoom chat and the information imparted on it. Basically people lie, and it is less easy to tell on Zoom than in person.

I absolutely agree with regard to the shortcomings of "Zooming" or Teams, there's a lot more to body language than facial expression, and in an ideal world face to face would revert pretty well to where it was. But again it depends upon the sector, large infrastructure or civil engineering projects are going to need boots on the ground at management and executive level more so than straight buying and selling of product, and particularly services. Large businesses (the publicly quoted ones) are wedded so much to financial performance and cost cutting is going to be key to that. Top of the list for getting the axe are things like staff welfare (canteens, perks etc) followed by business travel, bet that domestically or internationally. Things are going to be more than a little tight for the foreseeable future, and at very best some of the front-end business passengers may find themselves down the back with the plebs and that isn't going to be good for airline revenues.

Totally on the same page as Mr Mac.
There are limits to what can be achieved through online meetings and let's not forget that online meetings were perfectly possible before Covid. Covid did not inspire any great advance in the ability to do so (although the service providers would have you believe that). So that speaks for itself - people voted with their feet and went to meetings.
I suspect many commentators on the subject of business travel are not actually 'in business' and can't understand why business doesn't work in the same way as a Zoom call with grandma. There is increasingly frustration among colleagues about the inability to get out there to make things happen. The result of online meetings is often to kick the can further down the road. Online meetings are handy for quick updates etc but anything meaningful results in unacceptable compromises.

The greatest risk to aviation now is the total lack of confidence that people have in it. I have had several 'have you booked anything yet?' conversations recently and the response is always words to the effect of 'why bother because even if you book, you don't know if the flight will actually go and then you have the monumental task of trying to get your money back'.
Unless this cycle of distrust can be broken, the airline business will enter a new period of doom.

ATN
When we were based in the UK we had an accountant join us (ex DT) who came up with various cost cutting ideas for business from company car standardization, Hotel, Rail and air travel cuts, and deferring payment to suppliers to around 45 Days as we were then getting paid on average at about 30 days. We examined all the ideas, and implemented some, but not others, and reviewed all at 12 months. My comment and indeed action on his idea to cut air and indeed Hotels was to send our new colleague on a fact finding tour very early in his tenure,round some projects in the ME, India, Singapore. All flying at the back on the cheapest carriers as per his instructions with suitable cut price hotels. Unfortunately I could not get him on Iran Air but he did spend time on BIMAN courtesy of his idea. He came back to us not direct from SIN but via Dacca with suitable layover in the old terminal, and no lounge access. Needless to say he came home a changed young man and the flying hotel changes were quietly dropped. His company car plan was to go to VW/Audi for all company cars which upset some people, and after some catastrophic issues with the 160bhp Turbo Diesel (we had 3 A4 and 4 Passats in the garage with blown engines at one time) that was also dropped. He was very good at not paying tax to HMRC and tax breaks and wheezes were his stock in trade, but as for running a business and creating a team or indeed doing a project forget it. As for his payment to suppliers we proved to him that beating up on your suppliers was not what made our business grow, it was doing good work with good suppliers, who would go the extra 9 yards for you when asked because you treated them well. Our colleague resigned after 18 months saying we did not really understand what were doing, and that we would be bust in a few years (this was 2007). He left to join Carillion, need I say more. We operate worldwide and have tripled in turnover and profit since his time with us. He could count beans but he could not create one was my parting words to him.

The feet on the ground donkey work is what makes a deal happen, boss going to sign up is really way past the point of no return. The technical / standards / legal / finance / ops people will want to already have visited new client / supplier / customer depending on their size long before someone big turns up to cut the cake.

These are the people who find out what is really happening and whether new relationship has a chance of even getting off the ground.

Involved in one situation where £15-20k was spent on travel seeing a potential supplier and understanding what they did was seen as a cost until the Technical / Standards and Finance reports were gone through. Lets say this was peanuts V the £1 million plus potential investment that was mooted, said other company went bust 3 months later.

Number of cases for Portugal seem to have doubled in the last few days. Beginning to wonder how long Portugal remains on the UK's travel corridor list...

I was thinking the same myself. Yesterday's 400+ new cases (source: Johns Hopkins) may be a blip, but if it isn't then I;d expect that within 14 days they'll be back on the naughty step. Looking as though they ought to be taken of said step is Sweden, with less than 100 new cases yesterday, and a graph that suggests the rolling trend is still very much downwards. Sadly there's not much all for beach holidays in the Baltic in September!

Final nail in the IT coffin for this summer will be when Greece goes on the list, unless the UK does something revolutionary and quarantines only certain areas - eg Athens and Thessaloniki, and keeps "safe" islands open. Nationally, Greek daily number are running higher than they were in the Spring.

Whilst the UK media is fixated on "British holidaymakers" there is real damage being done to the UK, especially the London, and I expect Edinburgh economies as a result of the collapse of inbound tourism to UK because, obviously, nobody wants to spend their 14 day holiday in UK in quarantine.

This 14 day quarantine is nonsense anyway! With thousands pouring into the UK daily, how to they police it and with what resources?

Answer? They don't!

I understand Public Health England contact about 1 in 5 to check they are self-isolating, but as more countries are added to the list I expect they are overwhelmed to check even 10%.

Some newspapers a running a story about an air bridge between London and New York, just for residents of the two cities, being discussed by senior officials on both sides. NY has a rate of about 7.2 and London 11.3. The Americans are pressing for testing at the UK end, which is what people have been saying for months. Grant Shapps however doesn't have much faith in testing, so perhaps Bungling Johnson needs to intervene for this idea to get anywhere.

Why only from London here in the highlands of Scotland our rate is lower than London (not that I want to travel just now)

It raises the question again: does the government in this country actually want to support aviation?
No support package for any part of the industry that I can recall beyond the offerings that all business have had (although it should not be understated how hugely important they have been.)
With schools returning, office workers are now being encouraged to go back to work.
A cynic might wonder if MPs have interests in property companies that could lose out if people continue to work from home. Plus the exchequer will lose out on tax revenues from various sources. The lack of commuting journeys must be beneficial from an environmental perspective but I don't see that being mentioned much at present.
OK - the tax revenue issue is relevant with aviation too but maybe offset by the environmental topic and the politics around it which does make the news. I think it has been raised previously that an aviation downturn avoids lots of political trivails around LHR Runway 3 and other airport developments that were in the pipeline.
On the plus side, a large number of back-benchers from all sides of the house signed a letter to Rishi Sunak this week to again raise the aviation industry's plight. Let's hope those at the top start listening.

Perhaps aviation should be making a better case as to why it should get preferential treatment compared to other industries?

This is part of the baloney quarantine email I received and for the record I served a 16 day quarantine(two bonus days) for the ginger dictator owing to the garbage weather here in the UK.
"If the National Contact Tracing Centre is unable to contact you via 3 phone calls or an email in order to provide you with public health advice and support during your period of stay in your specified premises, Public Health Scotland is obliged to share your contact details with Police Scotland who will continue with the follow-up process to engage, explain, encourage, and enforce the law, where necessary"
Needless to say I never heard a peep.

Speculation that Portugal may head back onto the U.K. red list, no doubt because the school holidays have finished and that’s the most important thing...

Got a text from some friends who came back from Croatia today via AMS, they in a different part to area I was in. Easyjet flight into Zadar this morning had 2 pax on it, the outgoing one had circa 60. It was last flight of the season so possibly a reason for it, they flew back to LTN and said flight looked way less than half full from AMS.

Came back yesterday from Croatia and was down south between Split and Dubrovnik on a campsite.

Staff said 60% of holiday makers were German this year which was way higher than normal, most seem to have driven rather than flying by range of cars / RVs etc, Italians normally make up 30% but there were not many of them across the season, Poles / Czechs / Slovaks / Slovenians tended to make up the majority of the rest. Last weekend was great rush back and spoke to one family who had family members drive back earlier with a 28 hr trip back to Bavaria due to Covid / tunnel checks, they left Thursday and has a 12 hr trip. Site manager said normally airport shuttle runs daily but this year rarely as most felt safer driving.

Talked to quite a few Germans and many seems to have diverted from France / Spain this year due to Covid. Course it was a very small sample so who knows.

So did 7 passengers from 3 different parties catch Covid from the TUI flight or from a Greek Island? Now all the passengers are in quarantine.

Coronavirus: Cases on Tui flight from Zante to Cardiff https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-53966897

According to the BBC story a party from Plymouth returned on Monday (airline not specified) and this Cardiff flight on Tuesday, so they must have been infected on Zante. Doesn't say where they were tested, or whether both groups were in same hotel.
I think it's fortunate that the peak season ends this weekend.

Clearly not as the incubation period is, according to the UK gov, up to 14 days.

It's more than possible that some of them might have caught the virus in the UK before they even went to Zante.

Listening to the CMO, it sounds like most/ all of those with the virus are young and he was blaming lack of social distancing whilst on holiday.

Yes up to 14 days and this flight was last Tuesday. I bet all the passengers were thinking how they had a good holiday and avoided a fresh government country crackdown only to find themselves still having to go into quarantine.

They haven't been contacted yet. PHW has said they will contact all of the passengers tomorrow. Quite how it works when lots of the passengers live in England I don't know.

The incubation period is up to 14 days, but normally around 7 or less.

Breaking news everyone,the virus has been in the UK since March and probably before,in fact over 200 countries worldwide have the virus installed in there territory and that's called containment.I've got an idea,why doesn't every country close it's borders,no one in or out,that will stop the spread! and because we in the UK have a jolly good version of the virus we shall all live happily ever after.

If the UK had any idea at all it would have decided overnight, as soon as the issue regarding Zante had been identified that every arriving passenger landing on a direct flight from Zante would be met off the plane and have a mandatory test 9no exceptions) before clearing the UKBA, and told to quarantine for 24 hours whilst the test was fast tracked. Those who were positive, symptoms or no symptoms, should have been put into a tight quarantine and monitored - the rest put through 5 days quarantine, then tested again, and released from quarantine if negative.

Doing this would be a useful experiment of a random sample of the population, probably from younger age groups, to establish the extent of infection. If they had been away for 7 or more days then in all likelihood they would have contracted the virus on the island, and for whatever is left of the season that island could have been put on the quarantine list, leaving the rest of Greece open. How hard could it be?

I really don't believe the government has a clue how to work promptly and effectively. The longer this pandemic crisis goes on, the clearer that becomes.

16 cases now confirmed from that flight. Many people were not wearing masks with even more taking them off when they landed. So much for the claimed filtered air.

Coronavirus: 'Covidiots' criticised on Tui quarantine flight https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-53970217

Which of course does not necessarily mean that the virus was contracted on the flight.

Would anyone feel safe sitting on an aircraft with 16 existing cases of coronavirus on board? Either cases are rampant on the Island that hasn’t been picked up by the UK government or some passengers have picked up the virus from fellow passengers.

Yes, not everyone is as Coronaphobic as you are. When are the funerals for the 16 tragic victims ?? - oh wait...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52589449

Try December. This is a traceable one which means likely was here early last year as well, just not in the quantity that made it notifiable.

I'm not sure whether comment is stupid, or just plain arrogant.

It's not the 16 people that have tested positive, it's the people who over the subsequent 5 days who they have associated with, possibly infected, and could possibly inadvertently put into hospital, or worse potentially in their boxes, and 6 feet under. Are they happy to "kill their granny"?

The passenger who was interviewed said that others weren't wearing masks, were wearing them around their chins and roaming around the cabin of the aircraft. Frankly, if that is a reflection on how TUI are carrying out their duty of care, not just to the passengers but to their employees one wonders whether they should be allowed to continue to operate. Sadly, I imagine that other airlines are taking a similarly lax attitude towards passengers who won't comply with what are very simple, straightforward regulations. The CAA perhaps needs to read the riot act to TUI in particular, and make all carriers aware that the rules aren't optional.

All that said, it's a little strange that the passenger who was on the BBC news today apparently hadn't raised concerns at the time, and took until a week after the event to speak up. I can only say that if I was on the aircraft I'd have pressed the call button and asked the crew to sort the "covidiots" out at the time, and the captain should probably have made it clear to all passengers that he would divert and have the offenders unceremoniously kicked off the flight.

I am by no means covid-phobic, but if people have decided to travel on public transport of any sort then it is their responsibility to comply with the rules of that means of transport, and the carrier's responsibility to ensure compliance by those who try to disregard the rules.