An executive lands in Singapore for a three-day conference. Wednesday through Friday: presentations, networking lunches, hotel meeting rooms with terrible coffee. Saturday morning she could wander hawker centres, observe how locals conduct themselves in shops and cafés, perhaps visit a few retail locations relevant to her firm’s Asian expansion plans.
Instead, she catches the 6am flight home.
This is daft. Business travel is roaring back—global spending exceeded 1.5 trillion US dollars in 2024, up more than six per cent on pre-Covid-19 levels. And yet whilst companies cheerfully dispatch employees across continents, they miss an obvious truth: the journey itself, properly exploited, yields returns that dwarf whatever transpires in the conference room.
Call it ‘bleisure’ travel if you must—that awkward mash-up of business and leisure. The trend is no longer niche. More than half of business travellers now blend the two on at least a couple of trips per year. And they should. The case for staying an extra day rests on two foundations: keeping employees sane and gathering intelligence that no consultant can provide.
The exhaustion problem
Start with the human cost. Business travel, done traditionally, is miserable. A Deloitte survey found that 55 per cent cite fatigue as their main complaint. Time away from family. Work piling up whilst you’re gone. The whole exercise feels like an imposition.
Now consider what happens when you add a day. Stress drops. Happiness rises. Productivity improves upon return. These aren’t fluffy HR metrics—they’re measurable outcomes. Some 73 per cent of business travellers reckon bleisure opportunities benefit them as employees. More striking: 44 per cent say they’d have turned down trips without the leisure option.
The arithmetic makes sense. Employers already cover flights—typically half the cost. Funding an extra night’s accommodation and meals is no big deal. Everyone wins. The firm gets happier staff. The employee gets a mini-break.
Nevertheless, far too many companies persist in treating business travel as pure drudgery, something to be minimised and rushed through. Odd, given that 90 per cent of business travellers say they want to keep doing it for their entire careers. Make it pleasant and they’ll volunteer more readily. Make it grim and you’ll have to coerce them.
The intelligence angle
The wellbeing case is nice. The business case is better.
For firms eyeing new markets, that extra day is fieldwork. Walk through a city’s business district on a free morning. Notice how people dress. What they buy. How they interact in shops. Which coffee chains are packed and which sit empty.
These observations accumulate. They become cultural fluency—the quality separating successful expansions from expensive disasters. And the disasters are common. Research suggests 70 per cent of international projects fail from lack of cultural awareness. Companies that bother to understand local nuances enjoy 25 per cent higher success rates in foreign markets.
Take Starbucks in Australia. The chain opened stores in 2000, confident its formula would work. Australians drink coffee, after all. What could go wrong? Rather a lot, as it turned out. Australians preferred their established café culture—personal relationships with baristas, social gathering spots, quality over convenience. Starbucks offered something more transactional. By 2008 it had closed 61 stores, roughly 70 per cent of its Australian presence, nursing losses over 100 million US dollars.
One wonders whether a few executives spending weekends in Melbourne cafés might have noticed the problem before it became catastrophically expensive. You can’t learn these things from PowerPoint decks.
Netflix got it right in India by creating original content that reflected local stories. Subscriptions jumped 50 per cent. Starbucks, this time getting it right, adapted its Chinese offerings to local tastes. Both succeeded because someone took time to understand what locals actually wanted, not what headquarters assumed they wanted.
The relationship dividend
Business relationships, particularly outside the West, often depend more on personal connection than contract clauses. That extra day allows for precisely the informal interaction that builds trust. Dinner with local partners. Attending a football match. Conversations free from meeting agendas.
Communication styles vary wildly. Some cultures prize directness; others view it as rude. Some expect quick decisions; others prefer consensus. You can’t learn this in a conference room. You learn it watching how people actually behave when they’re not performing for foreign visitors.
The objections don’t hold
Won’t employees abuse it? The evidence says otherwise. Most travellers add their own money to extend stays. They’re not freeloading—they’re buying experiences at a discount because you’ve covered transport.
Won’t expense reports become nightmares? Travel management firms now offer tools that separate business from leisure costs. It’s solvable.
What about liability? Some 75 per cent of executives already favour extending trips, with 86 per cent supporting remote work from anywhere. The insurance and legal frameworks exist.
The real question is why so few companies embrace this. The bleisure market is expected to grow 500 per cent over the next decade. Firms that resist will lose talent to those offering flexibility.
Taking flight
Implementation isn’t complicated. Survey employees about their preferences. Clarify what the company covers versus what they pay. Partner with hotels for extended-stay rates. Signal from the top that taking an extra day is encouraged, not frowned upon.
The competitive advantage is real. Happier employees perform better. Culturally fluent firms make fewer expensive mistakes abroad. And both of these outcomes stem from the same simple act: booking one additional night.
That executive in Singapore faces her choice. Conference ends Friday afternoon. She books through Monday. Saturday she’ll shop, perhaps visit some shopping districts relevant to her company’s expansion plans. Sunday she’ll explore Gardens by the Bay, sample local food. She returns Monday refreshed rather than exhausted, carrying observations no consultant could provide, having spent her employer’s money more wisely than either party quite realises.
Smart companies will work this out eventually. The smarter ones already have.
Photo: Dreamstime.
