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.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1425269
growing economy and to a growing business —and nothing will replace face-to-face." She also sees some positives in tools like videoconferencing. For one thing, it could offer a dispersed global audience access to conferences held in one fixed location, using a hybrid of virtual and in-person delivery. And for hotels struggling to regain lost corporate dollars, they could repurpose existing facilities into f lex spaces for busi- nesspeople working remotely—or add collab- orative spaces for virtual companies needing some- where to meet. However things shake out post-pandemic, it's clear that many players in the travel sector will have to up their game if they want to bring business travellers back. "Business travel hasn't changed very much in 30 or 40 years," says Jarrett Vaughan, a UBC marketing profes- sor with over a decade's experience in the luxury hotel business, most recently work- ing for Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts. "It used to be seen as glamorous to travel as a businessperson," he says. "But in the last 20 years, it's become massively inconvenient." Vaughan argues that COVID has sped up the need for hotels, in particular, to innovate if they hope to survive. He notes that one of the last big innovations in the industry—Four Seasons' introduction of a 24-hour concierge and 24-hour room service—is decades old. "Hotels have to fight to figure out ways to add value to the busi- ness traveller's life. Because without it, all business travellers want to do is get back home as soon as possible." The prospect of losing corporate dollars is terrifying for many hotels, Vaughan adds. Business travel gives them a countercycli- cal buffer to the tourist market—filling up rooms midweek and during the quieter off-season. While corporate travellers typi- cally pay less on the average daily rate for each room, "what's important is that they'll come when nobody else will." Since COVID hit, the business market has become much less predictable. That's a big problem, says Vaughan, because a lot of corporate travel—especially meet- ings and conventions—is planned up to a decade ahead. "Hotels count on having a certain number of rooms sold at a specific rate far in advance, which allows them to budget for big capital expenditures like renovations." With the convention busi- ness on hold, many of those big expen- ditures are, too. It was, of course, the Pacific Dental Conference (with more than 15,000 at tendees) i n ea rly March of 2020 that proved to be the first superspreader event of B.C.'s COVID saga—and one of the last major conventions Vancouver has seen. The meetings and convent ions busi ness, which used to be the lifeblood of downtown Vancouver's economy, quickly came to a halt and has only recently started to show signs of life. At Destination Vancouver, which helps orchestrate many of those conventions, it's been a difficult 18 months. According to president and CEO Royce Chwin, the conference trade that comes through his organization typically accounts for about $1.6 billion in revenue annually; that doesn't include direct bookings to the hotels and the conference venues. "And we know that at least 5 percent of our overnight visitors to Vancouver are coming for a convention, a trade show or some sort of conference," says Chwin, who joined Destination Van- couver in July 2020 after a decade with Travel Alberta. Within weeks of showing up in Vancou- ver last year, he had to make some tough decisions. "We unfortunately had to cut our team by more than half; that was the reality of managing survival. So we're working with a much smaller team now, but that team actually has been very busy throughout this year." Chwin says, on a hopeful note, that 60 percent of the con- ventions cancelled in 2020 have since been rebooked—for 2022 through 2028. Still, the shape of conventions and meet- ings in Vancouver will invariably change, and Chwin is fully expecting a smaller over- all travel market. Pre-pandemic, travellers (both business and leisure) spent $14 billion in the city each year, with 46 percent of that coming from U.S. overnight and same- day travel; he's expecting only a modest rebound to $11 billion by 2026. "Prognosticators are suggesting that business travel and convention travel will be down somewhere between 5 and 20 percent permanently," Chwin says. "I don't think anybody really truly knows, but either way, there's a lot of ground to rebuild. It's not even restarting anymore; it's rebuilding this industry." FROM BUSINESS TO PLEASURE When Ron Hochstein reflects on some of his reasons for discretionary business travel— beyond the requisite site visits to Ecuador, SOURCE: MORNING CONSULT/AMERICAN HOTEL AND LODGING ASSOCIATION NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021 BCBUSINESS 65 Change of Plans South of the border, Independence Day was supposed to bring freedom from the pandemic to Americans. But by August, things were looking quite different–with the Delta variant raging in various corners of the country (and in this country, too). A survey of 400 U.S. business travellers that month showed them feeling spooked 52% L IK ELY TO CA NCEL E X IS T ING T R AV EL PL A NS W I THOU T RESCHEDUL ING 67% L IK ELY TO TA K E FE W ER T RIPS 60% L IK ELY TO POS T PONE T R AV EL PL A NS REMOTE POSSIBILITIES Ron Hochstein, president and CEO of Lundin Gold, predicts that virtual conferences will thrive even post-pandemic