The State of Corporate Travel and Expense 2022 7 SKIFT + TRIPACTIONS INTRODUCTION It’s been a unique year for corporate travel and spend, but there’s robust industry momentum pointing to a full recovery as early as 2022. The U.S. Travel Association’s Travel Recovery Insights Dashboard , which is updated monthly, reveals steady and faster-paced improvements in key metrics including hotel demand, air trips booked, travel spending, and group room nights. Highlights f rom the summer of 2021 included Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) data, which revealed that more than three-quarters (77 percent) of members and stakeholders now feel their employees are willing to travel for business in the current environment. Corroborating this trend is a traveler sentiment survey f rom global management consultants Oliver Wyman. The findings, published in early August 2021 and based on feedback f rom 5,300 respondents in nine countries, are brighter by far than those in reports f rom May and October 2020. “Business travelers are optimistic overall about the return of corporate trips,” states the report’s summary. “Globally, about 75 percent of business travelers expect to travel the same as or more than they did pre-pandemic. In the US, nearly 80 percent of US business travelers plan to book travel in the next three months.”