‘Bleisure’ trips boom as travelers mix work and play

It’s an age-old question: “Business or pleasure?” For airline passengers these days, the answer increasingly is both. The growth in so-called “bleisure” trips blending personal getaways with remote work has helped fill seats on planes during the coronavirus pandemic and marks a shift in travel patterns for an industry used to clear divisions between briefcase-toting road warriors and sun-tanned vacationers. Such excursions have been on the rise as the spread of the omicron variant has delayed the return to offices, especially among larger employers. The share of business trips that include a weekend has increased 23 percentage points to 38% since 2019, according to corporate travel manager TripActions Inc. “Many of our customers that we’ve historically called leisure travelers are actually flying for reasons beyond just vacation,” American Airlines Group Inc. President Robert Isom said on a conference call Thursday. “They may travel to a beach or a mountain destination, but they’re actually going to work remotely for the week. The lines between leisure and business travel are definitely blurred.” In response to the growing demand, TripActions added a dedicated personal trip booking platform in 2020. It averaged 22% monthly growth last year, said Kelly Soderlund, TripActions’ senior director of communications. A plunge in traditional business travel during the pandemic has hurt the bottom line of carriers that count on large corporate customers as a key source of profit. Their absence has been felt most deeply on international routes, as well as key cross-country travel corridors like New York to Los Angeles. Overall business travel bookings are 66% below pre-pandemic levels, according to industry trade group Airlines for America.<br/>