From airport lounges to hotels – how new spaces are embracing flex work

The business world has been cautiously acclimating to post-pandemic safety considerations and new employee preferences, but data shows that demand from business travellers is beginning to approach pre-Covid levels once again.

That was the message this month from International Airlines Group, the owner of British Airways, Iberia and Aer Lingus. Meanwhile, the boss of Britain’s main airport hub, Heathrow, said business travel for the last three months of 2022 was just 5% down on pre-pandemic levels, with numbers forecast to steadily increase this year.

The return of business travel should not come as a surprise: there is no form of meeting more powerful in building relationships than a meeting done in person. That may seem a curious thing to say for the chief executive of a tech platform dedicated to empowering enterprises to leverage the advantages of hybrid working, but there’s no contradiction here. In fact, the rise in new ways of working is likely only to boost business travel.

Why? Because hybrid working enables a distributed workforce. Enterprises are benefiting from access to talent across a much greater catchment than they were before, as recruitment and hiring are no longer subject to geographic limitations. With newly distributed workforces – and already distributed customers – if anything, enterprises will now have greater need to travel than when all their employees were working every day from the same office spaces.

This is how we work at Upflex: I lead the business from San Diego and we have teams in New York, London, India, with people based in place as far flung as Lisbon, Warsaw and Mississippi. Much of the day-to-day working is done remotely, but, when we need to, we meet in person – this facilitates our team’s ability to build relationships, develop strategy and encourage creativity. When the task requires the energy of the team in the same room, we get together.

In this new landscape of remote and hybrid work, we are no anomaly: many enterprises that we work with — from Schneider Electric to Willis Towers Watson — are adopting models like this in order to maximize the potential of hybrid work for their business and their people.

As we support these companies with the technology, solutions, global on-demand workspace access and the data they need to implement the strategies that work for them, we are seeing that there are as many different versions of those solutions as there are companies. We are also seeing that, invariably, there is an element of in-person work or co-location involved in the most effective examples of this new way of working. For certain tasks or activities, human beings work better together.

So, the rise in hybrid or remote working will not herald a decline in business travel, in fact quite the opposite. People will still travel for work, but more selectively and for different purposes than in the past. The enduring importance of business travel was a key driver of the global partnership that we agreed earlier this year with DragonPass, an end-to-end airport and rail station hospitality experience provider.

Through this first-of-its-kind partnership, Upflex’s customers and their employees are receiving on-demand access to 1,100 exclusive DragonPass airport and rail lounges via the Upflex platform. These lounges provide meeting rooms, individual workspaces, teleconference facilities, improved secure wi-fi, access to charging facilities and more, enabling travellers on the go to easily find and book a convenient work environment anywhere, rather than settling for notoriously patchy airport wi-fi, uncomfortable seating and lack of privacy.

Bringing airport and rail lounges into our flex workspace network is our response to the trend wherein new categories of workspace inventory are emerging, thanks to occupiers or operators seeking to either professionalise existing flex work arrangements or bring under-utilised space into use.

We’re also seeing this trend manifest in the hospitality industry, where hoteliers are looking at providing on-demand, bookable workspace in their lobbies or meeting rooms in response to the rise of flex working. Through Upflex, a business traveller can not only book workspace while on the go in airports, but on arrival at their destination – even holding meetings in bookable spaces through our platform – providing that all-important, end-to-end continuity of service.

“Work from anywhere” is the oft stated mantra of a new generation of workers embracing the hybrid revolution, but working well from anywhere requires the right facilities and support. We will continue to bring forward more innovative partnerships, such as our partnership with DragonPass, as the rise of hybrid work brings new opportunities for where and how work happens, now and in the future.