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November/December 2021 – She’s Got Game

With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.

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SOURCE: GLOBAL BUSINESS TRAVEL ASSOCIATION Hurrle says the past 20 years have been especially turbulent times for Forbes. It started with the fallout from 9/11 and continued through the SARS outbreak a couple of years later. "The 2008-09 reces- sion was probably the biggest hit we ever took in the corporate division," Hurrle explains. "After that, we saw a lot of belt- tightening—and clients really cut back on anything that wasn't considered essential to running the business." While corporate travel budgets eventu- ally bounced back, Hurrle says, there was a growing sense among the partners that things had reached "a bit of a saturation point," with growth stalling by the end of the 2010s. And then COVID-19 hit. "When the taps got turned off in March 2020 and all essential travel stopped, we struggled to bring people back to their home bases," Hurrle recalls. "We had trav- ellers stranded all across the globe—and, of course, absolutely no new travel was being booked. The only thing we were doing was cancelling trips, refunding whatever was possible and bringing people home." One of those stranded far from home was Ron Hochstein, president and CEO of Lundin Gold and a longtime client of Hurrle. "Late last year, I said to Grant: One time, I used to talk to you two or three times a week about travel. And this is the second time I've talked to you this year," remembers Hochstein, who over- sees Lundin Gold's Fruta del Norte proj- ect in Ecuador. Hochstein estimates that he used to travel 85 percent of each week—to the mine site and back, to visit various offices, or to attend investor meetings and conferences. "I went from jumping on a plane almost every day to twice in all of 2020: to Ecuador in March, and back in August." For the first three months of the pan- demic, Hochstein says, the international airport in Quito was shut down—and while travel has since become easier, with vac- cine passports replacing cumbersome quarantines, there's still great uncertainty in the air. "I was supposed to be going to Denver for a large conference this week," says Hochstein when we speak in September. "And just within the past few days, we made the decision to go virtual, rather than be there in person." Lundin Gold's travel expenditures for 2021 will add up to less than 5 percent of what was spent by the company in 2019. GIVE ME A REASON TO STAY As the world took its tentative first steps to opening up in 2021, many in the corpo- rate travel sector hoped that brighter days were just around the corner. Then this sum- mer, the Delta variant took off, throwing any return to "normal" into doubt. That uncertainty—combined with the business world's increasing comfort with virtual meeting tools, and growing discomfort with the carbon costs associated with travel—has tempered expectations of a big rebound. Some companies—including JPMorgan Chase & Co.—have even rolled out new policies, banning business travel and in-person meetings for employees who aren't vaccinated (or who won't disclose their vaccination status). The decline in travel spending at Lun- din Gold has been dramatic, but a similar trend can be seen across companies and industries—and starting well before Delta's spread. A survey by Deloitte of 150 travel managers and executives with travel bud- get oversight, conducted in late May and early June, projected that overall spending would remain well below pre-pandemic levels through the year—with expenditures in the fourth quarter only reaching 25 to 35 percent of 2019's total. To put that into context, says Nancy Tudorache, 2019 was "the pinnacle year" for business travel, with global spending reaching a record US$1.4 trillion. Tudo- rache is Canadian vice-president for the Global Business Travel Association, whose membership includes 9,000-plus busi- ness travel professionals. Over the course of 2020, she says, global corporate travel spending dropped to US$737 billion—a more than 52-percent decline. In Canada, she adds, business travel sank more than 80 percent in the last eight months of 2020, accounting for $2.6 billion in lost spending each month. While Tudorache is hopeful that things will turn around, she thinks it will be a slow, multiyear recovery. The focus in 2022, she says, will be on defining "business-critical" travel. "I think companies were just mov- ing along in their merry way before COVID," says Tudorache, who spent 10 years with the Metropolitan Hotels chain before join- ing the Burlington, Ontario–based GBTA in 2013. "Now companies really need to assess and understand what type of business travel and meetings are important to their business—and what the ROI is for that type of NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021 BCBUSINESS 63 Flight Delay A September survey of 600 travel professionals, conducted by the Global Business Travel Asso- ciation, found that the return to normal will be slow and painful –if normal ever does return of companies cancelled or suspended most or all domestic business trips in September of companies cancelled or suspended most or all international busi- ness trips that month plan to resume domestic business travel in the near future (1-3 months) plan to resume international business travel in the near future (1-3 months) 38% 41% 28% 18% If cancelled or suspended most or all trips: Has your company re-evaluated the ROI of business travel? 24% 18% 18% n YES n NO n NOT YET, BUT WE ARE CONSIDERING RE-EVALUATION n DON'T KNOW 77% travel. And they need to have some proper evaluations and metrics around that." For some companies, increasingly sophisticated technology points the way toward more virtual meetings, and Tudo- rache believes there will be some perma- nent erosion in the sector as a result. But, she adds, "business travel is essential to a NUMBERS DO NOT TOTAL 100 DUE TO ROUNDING

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