Breaking Down the World’s Major Business Travel Markets

When the GBTA Foundation released its annual global report and business travel forecast this July,sponsored by Visa, Inc., it highlighted five countries in a segment of newly emerging markets often overlooked because they aren’t as large as the traditional powers or the more commonly discussed BRIC markets. The five countries called out: Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Poland and Turkey are experiencing rapid growth that all but assures they will become the business travel markets of the future.

The forecast dug deeper than this, however, distilling all of the world’s major business travel markets down into four key segments to help travel buyers and suppliers anticipate shifts in the global business travel market and to identify emerging opportunities.

Looking at the current size of each business travel market and its potential for growth over the next five to ten years, these four segments were identified: The Stalwarts, BRIC Markets, The Newly Emerging and Midsize Matters.

The Stalwarts are comprised of the world’s major economies including markets in Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific. These economically mature markets are not growing nearly as rapidly as those in other segments, but they will continue to be the most dominant in business travel over the next five years.

The BRIC markets made up of large and rapidly growing business travel markets will be the first segment to challenge the Stalwarts in terms of market size. In the next five years we expect total business travel spending in the BRIC countries to snowball from $340 billion USD in 2014 to $528 billion by 2019.

The Newly Emerging, which includes the five countries mentioned at the start of this post, can be found in Latin America, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. This segment expects to see $93 billion USD in growth in business travel spending during the next five years.

Finally, the Midsize Matters are well-established business travel markets. They are not growing rapidly, but the markets in this segment are critical to global commerce and will remain important business travel markets well into the future.