Tech Workers Combine Business and Leisure Travel Most Often

Bleisure, despite its unfortunate name, seems to be having a moment. More workers are doing what they actually want to during, before, and after business trips, and the travel industry is playing catch up to adapt to shifting trends.

Expedia Group Media Solutions and Luth Research polled more than 2,500 business travelers from a variety of county about their habits when combining business and leisure travel during a trip.

The Unpacking Bleisure Traveler Trends report shows that workers from technology and manufacturing are most likely to combine business and leisure, while a whopping 60 percent of business travelers polled did so over the last year. Travelers from the UK, India, China, Germany, and the UK are taking advantage of business trips in a big way.

Technology, information technology, and software workers combined the two most often, with 24 percent reporting they’d taken a bleisure trip; manufacturing (13 percent) and finance (12 percent) followed in frequency. Overall, 67 percent traveled for a conference while 46 percent traveled for an external meeting and 42 percent for sales purposes.

About half of business trips, whether domestic or international, became bleisure trips. Nearly half said visiting a distant destination made it more likely for them to turn a business trip into a bleisure trip.

Source: Expedia Group Media Solutions

What Makes a Bleisure Destination

Food, beaches, and sightseeing are the most important factors for business travelers, unsurprisingly.

Source: Expedia Group Media Solutions

Most polled spend an hour or two to decide on whether to add leisure elements to their trip or not, using online search engines or talking to friends and family for advice. Only 33 percent left the city they went to for business for the leisure portion of their trip though.

Cheap hotels, as well, seem to play a part in the decision-making process. Hotels alone account for 32 percent of bleisure spending, followed by 19 percent for airfare and 16 percent for dining.

The upshot for hoteliers and airlines is that many make the decision to add on to their trip while already in destination, so marketing to travelers while they’re in the middle of their trip represents a major sales opportunity.

“Most bleisure travelers spend less time on research than they would on a leisure trip, so marketers have a shorter window to strategically target and influence behavior and purchases with call to action messaging,” concludes the report. “Bleisure travelers may not book everything in advance, highlighting opportunities for marketers to reach and convert travelers in-trip – especially for ancillary products like dining, tours and activities, entertainment and transportation.”