ABSTRACT
International business travel is now a familiar practice for executives. Evidence of this can be seen in the proliferation of hotel chains claiming to specialize in meeting the business traveller’s every need (e.g. Marriott Courtyard), websites and magazines providing up to the minute information about the latest services available to business travellers (e.g. Businesstraveller.com), and business-classonly airlines (e.g. Silver Jet) offering the ultimate mobile office. While accepting that it is often hard to disentangle travel that is solely orientated for business purposes and that which also serves tourist or social (familial) functions (Lassen, 2006), it seems undeniable that the globalization of both service and manufacturing industries has led to increasing obligations of proximity and the need for face-to-face contact (Jones, 2007), what Urry (2003) calls ‘meetingness’. With this in mind, it is perhaps surprising how little attention business travel has received from academics. One indicator of this research void is the number of business travel articles identified by the ISI Web of Knowledge. Here, as of June 2007, we find 427 articles, a somewhat lowly figure when compared with studies of other forms of mobility such as tourism (7,638 articles) and pilgrimage (1,876 articles).
