China and India emerge fastest-growing business travel markets globally

Spending on global business travel exceeded $1.2 trillion in 2015, an increase of 5% compared to 2014. China and India were the fastest-growing business travel markets in the world with increases of 11.4 percent and 11 percent respectively, as per the latest Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) report and forecast. In the North American continent, Canada registered a business travel growth of 2.4 percent, followed by the US, whose business travel market increased by 2%. The new report released by the GBTA Foundation, GBTA’s educational and research arm, entitled ‘the GBTA BTI Outlook – Annual Global Report & Forecast,’ estimates spending on business travel across the world to touch $1.3 trillion in 2016. The organisation expects global business travel spend to grow by nearly 6 percent over the next five years to reach $1.6 trillion by 2020. By reaching $291 billion, China overtook the United States, with $290 billion, to become the world’s largest business travel market in 2015. GBTA was quoted by the Travel Market Report as saying that India and Indonesia would average an above 10 percent growth as far as business travel spending is concerned over the next five years, with China’s business travel spending ranking the fifth fastest.