Lack of business travel saved German firms 50b euros

Frankfurt: German companies are estimated to have spent 50 billion euros ($60 billion) less on business travel in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic, German newspaper Welt am Sonntag reported.

"We estimate that they spent a middle- to high-single-digit billion amount on business trips last year," Hans-Ingo Biehl, head of the VDR Association of German Travel Management, said in an interview with the newspaper.

That would mark a decline of as much as 90 per cent from 2019. Biehl added that he expects business travel expenditure to remain well below pre-pandemic levels in 2021.

In addition, Welt am Sonntag reported based on its own survey that large companies - such as Bayer AG and BASF SE - saw savings worth hundreds of millions of euros, and that many expect not to go back to prior travel levels.