A senior executive at a multinational company recently showed me an internal memo titled “Further Strengthening the Implementation of Expense Management.”
In black and white, it states: no in-person internal meetings and no reimbursement for non-essential business travel.
The golden era of corporate travel once belonged to brands like Hilton, Marriott, and InterContinental — especially in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, where these international hotel chains thrived on corporate contracts with foreign firms.
Back then, friends working in several five-star hotels around Beijing’s CBD told me their weekday occupancy (Monday to Thursday) often exceeded weekends, with corporate rates nearly double weekend prices — and still fully booked.
But as China is no longer the land of high growth and high margins it once was for multinationals, travel budgets have become the easiest target — visible, immediate, and painless to cut.
Meanwhile, during the pandemic years, tools like Teams, Zoom, and Google Meet quietly slipped through every company’s back door — and to everyone’s surprise, they actually worked quite well.
At the end of the day, as profits shrink, online tech matures, and corporate policies tighten, the reduction in business travel frequency and spending has become inevitable.
