Amon Cohen is a specialist business travel writer and conference moderator. He is a regular contributor to BTN Europe, Business
Travel News and The Beat, and is a conference director for Business Travel Show Europe.
I don’t know why you work in business travel, but for me, above all else, it’s the opportunity to transcend borders through international fellowship. When Russia launched its brutal war on Ukraine, I was in Berlin. There, at the GBTA Europe/VDR conference, I felt comforted to share friendship and knowledge with colleagues from across Europe.
It was a reassuring embodiment of multinationalism at the very moment the grossest consequences of the globally spreading cancer of ultra-nationalism were being felt only a few hundred miles farther east.
In the travel business we like to convince ourselves that travel is fundamentally a force for good, that travel broadens the mind. The principle is that visiting other countries teaches us that people everywhere are the same and that everyone benefits when we work together.
But is that an assumption born of complacency? Vladimir Putin has travelled. Admittedly, he didn’t get out much during Covid, spawning a theory that isolation degraded his already limited sense of empathy and reading of how others might react.
However, the Russian president did manage to pop over to Beijing to watch the opening of the Winter Olympics in February this year. The three values of Olympism are supposedly excellence, friendship and respect “with a view to building a better world” (I quote directly from the International Olympic Committee website). It would appear Mr Putin did not come away from China greatly inspired by those ideals.
Putin doesn’t do international fellowship like we wrapped ourselves in in Berlin. He doesn’t want cooperation. Losing the ability for himself and his people to fraternise with citizens of other countries (including through business travel and meetings) is no hardship. He’s not interested in him or his people joining the global party in the first place. That’s an incomprehensible and terrifying realisation for those of us working in such an inherently collaborative sector as travel.
So now an iron curtain descends once more across our continent. Russian businesspeople cannot fly to Western Europe, nor vice versa. We cannot even travel through each other’s airspace – an environmental disaster apart from anything else, as aircraft are forced to burn additional fuel to fly more circuitous routes to their destinations.
The reversal of the liberalisation of travel, especially business travel, is a trend which has been building for a decade. I see more coming. China closed its borders to international visitors in 2020 to pursue its zero-Covid policy. It appears in no hurry to re-open, and the suspicion grows that this walling up of the world’s second-largest economy has become less about medical caution and more about a return to its instinct for isolationism evident over many centuries.
Shunning the rest of the world may seem a baffling strategy to those who believe international trade and travel can only benefit all parties. Yet sometimes we need to understand history. Free trade and free travel are philosophies developed in countries which have gained the most from such beliefs.
China has not forgotten the pain and humiliation of being forced in the 18th and 19th centuries to accept opium from British-controlled India and, after losing the Opium Wars of the mid-19th century, to establish treaty ports and concessions in which the British and other foreigners could live and trade freely outside Chinese jurisdiction.
It remains the case that business travel, much as we would like to think otherwise, is not always a force for good. The army of lawyers, accountants and other professionals sent east to liberalise the economy of the former Soviet Union too fast, too unaccountably and too inequitably in the late 1980s and 1990s sowed some of the violence raining down on Ukraine right now.
Last year I wrote about the growing role for travel managers of mobility compliance: checking travellers have correctly followed the proliferating rules for crossing borders, including whether those borders can actually be crossed at all.
Sadly, these tasks have not disappeared with the abatement of Covid. Along with the core travel risk management imperative of ensuring travellers’ personal safety, keeping tabs on who wants to keep travellers out looks more and more a priority over the coming years.