Remember when the conventional wisdom was that business travel was, basically, finished? Zoom would handle it. Slack would handle the rest. Nobody would ever board another red-eye for a quarterly review. Funny how that turned out.
Corporate trips have come roaring back, and they’ve changed shape on the way. The two-night flight in, flight out, sleep in a hotel near the airport routine still exists, sure. But a quieter trend has been building underneath it: trips that stretch into weeks or months. Some HR teams are quietly booking an apartment that are fully furnished in Toronto for a project lead who’s going to be onsite for six or eight weeks straight, because a hotel room with a kettle and a minibar isn’t really living. It’s surviving.
According to the latest GBTA forecast, global business travel spending is projected to keep climbing into 2026, even with all the trade and policy noise in the background. Which, fair enough, suggests companies still see real value in putting people in rooms together. Or in cities together, anyway. You can see more on shifting work norms in other business coverage if that’s a rabbit hole worth going down.
Here’s what seems to be driving the shift toward the longer kind of trip.
1. Projects don’t fit in a week anymore
A lot of what gets sent across the country (or the border) now is implementation work. New software rollouts. Plant retoolings. M&A integrations. These are the kinds of things that arguably can’t be done over Slack, and they don’t wrap in five days. Two months is more like it. Sometimes longer.
When the trip is that long, the hotel math stops working. Both for the company’s wallet and for the human being doing the work. People need a kitchen. They need somewhere to put a suitcase that isn’t a luggage rack. Maybe a couch that doesn’t pull out into a bed.
2. Relocation has gone temporary
This one’s less intuitive. Companies used to relocate people permanently. Now they often don’t. A 2024 Atlas Van Lines survey flagged the rise of “alternative assignments”, which includes extended business travel, cross-border commuting, and rotational placements, all in place of the classic pack-up-the-family transfer.
It’s cheaper. It’s easier to reverse if the role doesn’t pan out. Employees tend to prefer it too, since their kids stay in school and their partner keeps their job. The catch is that someone still has to live somewhere, for months, in a city they don’t always know.
3. Talent shows up where the talent is
Look, there are only so many people who can do certain jobs. If the person you need is in Toronto and the work is in Toronto, you send your director up there for the duration. You don’t fly them home every Friday for three months. Or you do, and you regret it.
This is doubly true for specialized roles. Niche engineering, regulatory work, anything where remote handoffs lose something in translation. Side note: it’s also why coworking and serviced housing keep popping up in the same conversation now, often in the same sentence.
Is this the new normal or a phase? Hard to say. But for now, the long trip is back, and the suitcase in the corner of a furnished kitchen is, weirdly, kind of the new office.
