Small Business Labs

The Rise of Blended Travel

The global lodging giant IHG's Crowne Plaza hotel chain recently released The Future of Blended Travel. Key quote on blended travel:

"The convergence of business and leisure behaviors was once remarkable. Not anymore ... as post-pandemic travelers increasingly adopt seamless blended travel behaviors and attitudes."

The key data is illustrated by the report chart below.  It shows the majority of respondents to the study's survey plan combine business and leisure travel over the next year.

The report lists 4 key trends as driving the growth of blended travel:

1. Reworking Work: Travel to a hotel or resort in a warm, exotic overseas location or an exciting city as a base for remote flexible working has boomed over the past two years.

2. Hybrid Living: Increasing number of business travelers are planning to extend their work travel with leisure days to get the most from their trips. Key to this is the flexibility and ability to work while traveling – whether it is a long-haul trip or a weekend visiting family – that's enabled by new working practices.

3. Upskilling and Side Hustles: Upskillers and Side Hustlers are using the power of travel to fuel inspiration, feed curiosity and enable networking and connections.

4. New Care Economy: More than ever before, families want to travel with children and grandparents. Multi-generational travelers seek out destinations that cater to all ages.

A key reason we like this study is we vastly prefer the term "blended travel" over "bleisure travel", which we first reported on in 2015. 

No one seemed to like the term bleisure travel - Skift even called it "that awful moniker".  But it's been commonly used.  Hopefully, blended travel will replace it as the term of choice.

We consider the blending of travel and work an important social and business trend.  It's a driver behind the growth of remote work, the growing number of digital nomads, and even the shifting patterns of where people live.  

It's a trend worth following and the Crowne Plaza report is well worth reviewing.  

Airbnb's Guild on How Communities Can Benefit From Digital Nomads and Remote Workers

Airbnb says its Guide to Live and Work Anywhere "provides industry-first analysis of global remote work initiatives."

This isn't even close to accurate- there have been many studies on this topic. 

But marketing hyperbole aside, the Guide provides an interesting look at how cities benefit by offering incentives to attract remote workers.

They also show the incentives cities are using. Below is the Guide chart on Tucson's remote worker incentive package.

The growing competition among cities and countries to entice digital nomads is one of the most interesting remote work trends.

Whether it's the creation of digital nomad villages, providing specialized remote work visas - or, as Airbnb's Guide points out - providing direct financial assistance, countries and cities are increasingly engaged in an arms race to attract remote workers.

Small Business Mobile Banking Use Varies by Generation

Barlow Research Associates A Generational Shift in Business Banking Behaviors Is Upon Us, and It's Not Just Among Your Millennial Customers covers the banking transaction channels used by small businesses by the age cohort of the owner.

As the Barlow chart below shows (click to enlarge), there's a big difference in the use of mobile banking applications.

64% of Gen X and Millennial SMB owners (those younger than 57) regularly use mobile apps for their banking transactions.  Only 41% of Baby Boomer SMB owners (those aged 57 +) use them.

The article also points out that the average age of a small business owner is 62.  

We've covered that the average small business owner is pretty old a fair amount over the years.

But it's worth repeating because younger tech startup owners tend to get much attention.  This leads people to believe the average small business owner is younger than they are.

Barlow, a leading provider of market research and consulting services to financial institutions, defines small businesses as those with between $100,000 and $10 million in revenue.  This means a strong majority of these firms have employees.

Quibi Bets Big on Mobile Movies

Quibi is a startup entertainment company that has raised $1.4 billion in venture funding to build a new content streaming service designed exclusively for mobile devices. 

Founded by Hollywood titan Jeffrey Katzenberg and led by CEO Meg Whitman, a Silicon Valley titan, the company has additional star power because of who they've signed up to provide content. 

According to TechCrunch:

"Quibi has attracted big-name talent to help kick off its first year, including Academy Award winners Steven Spielberg, Peter Farrelly and Guillermo del Toro; directors like Antoine Fuqua, Lena Waithe, Sam Raimi and Catherine Hardwicke; and stars like Stephan James, Chrissy Tiegen, Laurence Fishburne, Dave Franco, Bill Murray, Emily Mortimer and Kevin Hart, to name a few."

Quibi, which is short for “quick bites” is going to offer short-form videos of 4 to 10 minutes on everything from movies and TV shows in the form of short chapters to daily news and sports reports. 

These bite-sized pieces of content will have Hollywood quality production values, meaning they're expensive to make.  According to MarketWatch's article on Quibi:

"Lighthouses,” the service’s premium videos, will cost about $100,000-per-minute to produce, on par with some of the most expensive shows on TV.

The question, of course, is whether or not people want and will pay for high quality, short-form video entertainment on their phone (Quibi is planning on charging $4.99 to $7.99 per month for access to their content). 

Key quote from Fortune from Jeffrey Katzenberg on why Quibi will work:

“Everything they’re being offered today is centered around the TV. This is about your in-between time,” he told Fortune. “It’s quick bites, on the go and in between. It’s a very, very different viewing habit that we know our anticipated customers already have.… There is an unbelievable amount of content being consumed today on phones on the go. It’s just not of this quality.”

The shift to mobile computing devices is one of the most powerful technology trends of the past decade.

Whether Quibi is successful or not, it's an excellent example of the continuing impact this shift is having.

The Pros and Cons of Working Remotely

Recode's How remote work is quietly remaking our lives provides a deep dive on the growing impacts of the shift towards working remotely. Key quote:

"The changes remote work has introduced have happened so gradually you may not have noticed. But its growing popularity is remaking how we work, the tools we use to work, how we communicate at work, and even the hours we work ... What was once a rarity among a select set of workers is quickly becoming a defining feature of the future of work."

The pros and cons of remote work are well known, but the article chart below nicely summarizes them. The underlying data comes from a remote worker study done by the social media marketing firm Buffer.

The big pro is, of course, flexibility.

We cover the importance of flexibility a lot (if you do a Google search on "flexibility "Small Business Labs"" you will find 3400 citations).

But it still needs reinforcing -  it's a key driver of both the shift to remote work and the rise of independent work.  

We also certainly agree remote and distributed work is a defining feature of the future of work.

And to better understand this trend, we closely follow two remote work edge groups - digital nomads and fully remote organizations.

Digital nomads can be thought of as remote workers on steroids. Because they're both remote and nomadic, they tend to have advanced methods for work remotely - including how they use technology. 

Fully remote organizations are also on the leading edge of remote work because, well, all of their employees are remote. 

While reading the Recode article we were struck that remote work is a great example of Amara's Law, which is:

We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.

Back during the first Internet boom in the 1990s one of the most common forecasts was that very soon everyone would work remotely. This, obviously, didn't happen. 

But 2 decades later, it's starting to happen.

Working Remotely the Norm for independent Workers

According to data from the 2019 MBO Partners State of Independence study, 83% of full-time independent workers report working remotely at least some of the time, and 31% report working remotely full-time.

As the study chart below shows (click to enlarge), this is substantially higher than what traditional full-time job holders report. 

That full-time independent workers are more likely to work remotely than full-time traditional job holders is no surprise.

But that almost 1 in 3 three work remotely full-time is a bit surprising and illustrates the growing nomadic nature of work.

This is in large part being driven by improvements in the technology that support remote work.

Online video and chat services make it easy to connect and communicate with customers and partners, online content creation tools and cloud storage enable work to be done and delivered from remote locations, and online marketplaces provide remote access to new customers.

Another driver is the growing acceptance by hiring organizations that remote workers can be highly valuable and productive contributors. 

A 3rd driver is, of course, more people want to work remotely.

Bleisure Travel Continues to Increase

We first reported on bleisure travel, which is the the blending of business and leisure travel, back in 2015. 

AAccording to the folks at the expense reporting and management firm, SAP Concur, it continues to gain popularity. 

Key quote from their blog post Do You Bleisure? The Word We Love to Hate is Gaining Popularity Across the Globe:

... according to new SAP Concur travel and expense data gathered between January 2017 and December 2017 ... “bleisure” trips increased by 20% from 2016 to 2017. And during this time, more than 2.2 million bleisure trips were taken by business travelers around the globe, making up 10% of total business trips.

Back in 2015 bleisure travel was considered something that millennials mostly did.

But the SAP Concur data shows these days all ages are taking advantage of bleisure travel opportunities. Again from their post:

On average, millennials make up the largest share of bleisure travelers in the world, accounting for 38% of all bleisure trips in the Americas region in 2017, however Generation X (31%) and baby boomers (31%) are not far behind!

In case you're wondering where people go on their bleisure trips:  "In the Americas the top destinations are NYC, Chicago, and Los Angeles; in EMEA, Tel Aviv, London, and Paris; and in APAC, Tokyo, Singapore, and Shanghai."

These locations are not surprising. They're all major business hubs that also attract a lot of leisure travelers.

Also not surprising is Airbnb is a growing supplier of bleisure travel accommodations. 

According to Conur's data, 70% of expensed trips using Airbnb lodging include a Saturday night stay, compared to just 10% of trips with hotel bookings.

One of the most famous bleisure travelers is Marco Polo, so the the trend is not new.  But it seems to be becoming much more popular.

Digital Nomads Enter the Mainstream

MBO Partners last week released Digital Nomadism: A Rising Trend, a research brief on digital nomads. We worked with MBO Partners on this study.

Digital Nomads are wanderers who have a location-independent lifestyle that allows them to travel and work anywhere they can plug into the Internet. 

Some are short-term nomads who only travel and work for short periods of time.  Others do it for many years. And while globe trotting digital nomads get the most media attention, many never cross a border, choosing instead to live and work while exploring a single country. 

The three key study findings from our perspective are:

1. About 4.8 million Americans currently describe themselves as being digital nomads. While only about 2%-3% of U.S. adults, this is still a large number of people.

2. About 17 million Americans who aren't currently digital nomads say they will become one over the next 2-3 years. Also, 42 million say they might become one over the next 2-3 years.

The research brief points out that most of these people are unlikely to become digital nomads. Instead, they will likely continue to be "armchair digital nomads" following the exploits of digital nomads instead of becoming one themselves.

But these numbers clearly illustrate how popular the digital nomad trend has become. As the Forbes article on the study - Digital Nomadism Goes Mainstream - points out, digital nomadism has become a spectator sport followed by millions. 

3. The demographics of digital nomads are broader and more diverse than most think. While they skew male and younger, 31% are female and as the chart below shows, 54% are 39 or older. 

We closely follow the digital nomad trend for several reasons.

First, digital nomads are basically mobile workers on steroids. Because of this, they provide insights on the future of distributed work.

They've also chosen a non-traditional career path with a focus on work/life balance and integration. These themes ripple through our broader research on independent workers.

And most of them are independent workers, which, of course, is one of the main areas we study. 

We will continue to track and report on this topic. See the report for more details.

LinkedIn's Deep Dive on VanLifers and Digital Nomads

LinkedIn's From van life to careers, figure it out as you go covers a couple who have spent several years as VanLifers. 

It includes an excellent video that is the most professionally done of any VanLife video we've seen and is well worth watching.

For those not familiar with with the VanLife trend, it refers to the growing number of mostly millennials who have traded in their homes and apartments for life on the road in vans. 

Key quote from the article on the featured VanLife couple:

The couple is among other digitally savvy nomads, who have customized Volkswagen Syncros and other vans to live and work on the road rent-free. Some have parlayed their nomadic life into social media fame under the hashtag #vanlife. But Jess and Jorge aren't modern hippies abandoning capitalism. Between their Instagram posts, YouTube videos, blogging and photography, Jess and Jorge are hustling hard from inside their roughly 80-square-foot van. 

It's become a bit of a craze and there are millions of #VanLife posts on Instagram, Pinterest, Facbook and Twitter.

These posts tend to show pictures of young, adventurous, photogenic millennials - often with adorable dogs - enjoying the great outdoors in beautiful places.

For example, the picture below is from the blog of the #VanLife Hearnes family and shows them having fun while touring Utah with their dogs.

What these pictures don’t tend to show are the downsides of VanLife.

These include limited access to bathrooms and showers, breakdowns, bad weather, work problems and the wide variety of challenges associated with living in a very small space.

The LinkedIn article and video are somewhat unusual in that they cover both the pluses and minuses of VanLife.

VanLife is part of the broader digital nomad trend. Digital nomads are folks with a location-independent work and lifestyle that allows them to roam the earth working and living anywhere that has a good Internet connection.

Digital nomads have become so common that Estonia and other countries are even considering offering special digital nomad visas.

We’ve long followed the digital nomad trend. The reason is these people are mobile workers on steroids and they provide insights on the future of mobile and distributed work.

We’re just starting a project that includes more research on VanLifers and digital nomads. We’ll report our finding in the coming months.

Wireless Data Usage Continues to Explode

Wireless data consumption in North America has grown 9 fold since 2012.

This comes as no great surprise, but the numbers are still impressive.

The chart below illustrating this is from the Axios article America's insatiable wireless appetite.

According to the article: 

• In 2016, there were 291 million unique wireless subscribers in North America, representing 80% of the region's population.
• There are now more mobile subscriptions in the U.S. than people.

We often point out that every time we make a mobile computing forecast we think it's too high. And so far every time we've made a mobile computing forecast, it's turned out to be too low.

We don't forecast smartphone data usage. Just as good. No way we would have forecast data usage to grow so quickly.