Before the Covid-19 pandemic, business trips were commonplace in a wide variety of industries. They could take as little as a day or as long as a day.depending on its nature and purpose. However, with the health crisis, companies have been forced to suspend this type of travel and resort to video calls to meet their needs.

And after the pandemic? Will professionals go back to carrying luggage and flying to an international destination (or not) to meet with clients and close deals? According to CNN, partnerships and contracts continued to be signed even from afar and it may be difficult to return to the "old normal."

"For many people, frequent business travel has become more of a burden than a privilege," says Scott Cohen, professor at the University of Surrey, England. Cited by the same publication, he indicates that there is a growing recognition that frequent business travel can negatively impact health and personal relationships.

For airlines, however, a weak (or even non-existent) recovery in this type of travel could have very harsh effects. Although, corporate passengers represent only 12% of the total, data from PwC indicates that on some flights, they can generate up to 75% of profit.

And the explanation is simple: people traveling for business often book last minute and therefore more expensive flights. Zach Honig, editor of The Points Guy, says that a corporate traveler would pay up to a thousand dollars for a ticket the day before the trip, when an ordinary passenger would have spent 100 dollars for the same ticket two months earlier.

The International Air Transport Association, which represents 290 airlines worldwide, expects business travel to recover at a slower pace than leisure travel.

Besides the technological issue, which has made it easier to do business at a distance, and the impact on personal life, there is yet another aspect to consider: many companies are cutting back on corporate travel in order to reduce their environmental footprint.

Lloyds Bank, for example, has already guaranteed that it will reduce by over 50% the carbon emissions associated with its employees' travel. The British bank - led until recently by the Portuguese António Horta-Osório - is in line with the Dutch ABN Amro, which intends to change the way corporate trips are made, opting for the train whenever the destination is European, among other measures.