Business travel fatigue
While business travel remains essential for many organisations, the focus too often is on budgets and logistics. But in reality, travel fatigue is quietly draining energy, productivity and morale – especially among mobile workers who travel regularly to sites, clients or regional offices – and this is undermining productivity and staff retention.
Business travel may be bouncing back but these aren’t occasional trips with built-in downtime. They’re frequent, operationally critical journeys, which often involve late nights, early starts and little chance to reset. Too often, employees are expected back on-site the next morning or are being booked onto back-to-back trips with no breathing room.
When travel is treated purely as a logistical exercise, its human impact gets overlooked, and it’s often HR and operations teams which end up dealing with the consequences – whether it’s absenteeism and disengagement or higher staff turnover.
This needs to change. Companies with regular travellers need wellbeing policies to protect their health and safeguard the impact of regular business travel on staff morale.
Supporting the people behind the travel
A more sustainable approach to workforce travel means balancing operational demands with employee wellbeing. That starts by embedding support into travel policies and everyday practices.
Practical steps include:
Setting in stone a period of recovery time after travel into travel planning policies, rather than expecting staff to work immediately after long journeys.
Encouraging healthy routines on the road – such as sleep, meals and exercise – by selecting accommodation with kitchens, gyms, or quieter locations.
Offering mental health support, particularly for those who travel frequently and who may experience stress, isolation or disruptions to their home life.
Reviewing travel policies to reflect the realities of mobile work, rather than assuming one size fits all. Mobile workers are the experts on what makes a trip manageable, and their insights can highlight overlooked pain points and suggest simple fixes.
Wellbeing and efficiency can coexist
For many organisations, travel is a core part of how business gets done. Engineers, technicians and field-based teams often work long hours in unfamiliar settings, facing unique physical and mental pressures. Their travel needs differ from those of occasional business travellers - and planning should reflect that.
Leading businesses are already making meaningful changes. Shift patterns are being adjusted to allow for rest. Hotel selection is being guided by what helps employees feel comfortable and recharged. Booking and expense systems are being simplified to reduce admin and frustration.
Rethinking travel for retention and ROI
We are seeing a trend amongst our clients whom have particularly mature travel programs, trying to look after how to get their biggest asset – their travellers – to ensure they arrive in peak condition when travelling for business to meet the objectives of the journey.
Travelling is tiring whether domestic or international and often involves early starts, late nights and disrupted sleep or ‘recovery’ across time-zone takes. This takes its toll and has a slow, cumulative, effect on people which manifests in different ways. Removing friction from a trip, no matter how small on the face of it, can make a big difference to the end result.
After all, it wasn’t that long ago that many City firms used their travel policy as an integral part of their recruitment and retention policy.
We have a far deeper understanding of how diet, sleep and exercise along with one’s environment can have a positive and negative impact on people on many levels including their effectiveness. The selection of hotel, time of trip, and transport links both ends are now starting to feature in the planning of many clients, as well as access to exercise facilities and fresh air all of which help combat fatigue and enhance wellbeing.
