Nearly half of staff want more options for business travel

Fourty-two per cent of UK office workers who make business trips would like their employer to make it easier for them to use a mix of transport (multi-modal journeys) for business trips, according to research from Enterprise Rent-A-Car.
 
And around 85% think they and/or their employers should be incentivised to encourage multi-modal journeys, with tax breaks or similar rewards.
 
Currently, employees are making more than twice as many multi-modal trips for leisure purposes - 37% - as opposed to 18% who had only used multi-modal transport for work, indicating there is an opportunity for companies to adopt more multi-modal options to satisfy employee travel needs.
 
However, nearly two-thirds of those surveyed (64%) say their companies don’t currently encourage – or don’t know if they encourage – multi-modal travel, with most relying on employees to use their personal car for work trips (87%).
 
When asked why they had used multi-modal journeys, respondents said because they were less expensive (33%), fast (27%), relaxing (22%), more environmentally friendly (20%) and safe (20%).
 
The research showed younger Generation Z workers, born between 1996 and 2015, are especially keen on multi-modal travel: almost nine in 10 (88%) of Gen Z employees had made a multi-modal journey in the last 12 months, compared with only 57% of Baby Boomers (those born before 1964). Gen Z are keener to avoid using their own car for a business trip (60%) compared to 41% of Baby Boomers.
 
When it comes to travelling for work, 58% of all business trips are taken in a private car, and the majority of those surveyed (81%) said they use their own car for at least some of their business trips every year.
 
Those surveyed said that, on average, nearly seven out of 10 (68%) of their business journeys were not possible by public transport alone.
 
One-in-five (21%) of respondents said they lived within easy walking distance of a car rental branch and one-in-four (24%) within easy walking distance to a car club vehicle, suggesting that some form of multi-modal journey involving rental may be possible for millions of office workers in the UK.