How Gender Does (or Doesn't) Play a Role in Traveler Happiness

Men may be from Mars and women from Venus, but the sexes are not so different when it comes to what they value in business travel.

According to BTN's research, female travelers are the more content of the two; the segment scored 59 on a 100-point scale for overall happiness, three points higher than men. But on certain factors, the distance between the scores narrows.

Both male and female travelers placed a premium on personal safety support; convenient flight times, hotel locations and the like; ease of expense reporting; and access to reliable Internet and data connections. Other factors, such as empowerment to attend to health and wellness, may not be among the top five concerns of either segment, but the gap between how important each is and how effectively the company is delivering represents a significant opportunity for travel managers to improve traveler happiness overall (see the Traveler Perceptions table at bottom).

The Safety & Security Myth

There's a myth that women are much more concerned about personal safety when traveling on business. In BTN's research, the male traveling population actually ranked personal safety support as its No. 1 concern. For women, it ranked No. 2. However, on a five-point-scale for importance, women ranked it higher than men did.

Digging in further, women said companies were more effective at supporting personal safety, rating it 3.85 out of 5, while men rated their companies' effectiveness slightly lower, at 3.8. "We get lots of training before we go into a dangerous environment," said one female traveler who works as a media producer and travels 10 times a year in the U.S., Canada and Europe. "There are safety protocols and things [my company does] to mitigate dangerous situations. I feel like they have a lot of safety checks in place and they try to keep that top of mind."

An added layer to the security piece of the travel puzzle is communication. Female travelers placed a premium on receiving pre-trip travel advisories about serious incidents, ranking it No. 5 in importance. For women, there's a significant gap between how important this factor is and how effectively companies are meeting expectations.

One female traveler who worked for a pharmaceutical company told BTN about a trip to Mexico City she felt was ill advised. "I don't feel like they really prepared those of us going on that trip for what the atmosphere there would be like," she said. "We did actually have somebody meet us when we got off the plane to get us through customs, but then, on the way back, we were kind of just dropped off at the airport. It was kind of hit or miss. It was just like, 'Here, go to Mexico City!'"

Though men ranked pre-trip travel advisories about serious incidents lower in importance, a similar importance-effectiveness gap still exists, which means this still could be a worthwhile area for travel managers to explore to boost happiness for both segments.

Time & Convenience Rule

Both men and women want travel to be more convenient, but they prioritize it differently. Female travelers ranked convenient flight times, hotel locations and the like as the most important factor for traveler happiness, at 4.6, while male travelers ranked it third, at 4.4. Similarly, women considered tools and memberships that would allow them to skip lines or bypass typical travel processes important, scoring it 4.2, while men scored it 3.9. Women also scored ease of expense reporting slightly higher in terms of importance, 4.5, than men did, 4.4.

Why do women place a premium on convenience and time-saving measures? The answer likely points to childcare, which, despite recent progress, still falls largely on mothers. In a 2013 study called Work Life Balance Up in the Air: Does Gender Make a difference Between Female and Male International Business Travelers?, which was published in the German Journal of Human Resource Management, Iris Kollinger-Santer and Iris Fischlmayr found that gender plays no role in work-life balance, unless of course those travelers have children.

"I used to be a lead program manager. … That took me to Cairo, when I missed my son's first day of kindergarten," said one woman who works in government and travels 10 times a year. "I was on travel for almost two weeks when my daughter was four months old. This was 16 years ago, before the advent of the smartphone, and I left that job because I did not want to be away from my baby."

Having children places "additional burden on female travelers and does not allow any, or at least not enough, time to deal with stress," Kollinger-Santer and Fischlmayr wrote. "Apart from the high stress levels due to organizing family life, childcare and household, women are confronted with a lack of understanding from the society which might even end up in accusations."

All that is to say that female travelers with children often deal with an added level of stress for the reasons Kollinger-Santer and Fischlmayr mention. So when women have to travel, they want to know they're going to be able to catch a flight at a reasonable time and won't have to wait in long lines at each stage of the journey. Women, too, ranked reasonable downtime before returning to the office as more important than men did. The gap between importance and effectiveness was almost a full point, at 0.9. For men it was 0.7.

It's worth noting, however, that in qualitative interviews with travelers, both men and women found it more difficult to travel after they had children. "Sunday nights are harder with [my oldest son] because as he gets older, he's more aware that it's Sunday night, Daddy's going away and not back until Thursday," said one man who works in finance and travels more than 25 times per year. "He knows how far away Thursday is now, and so the older [my children] get, the more conscious of the absence they are and it's harder. … They're getting into more things that I want to be a part of."

But even travelers without children said the hassle of things like booking through a corporate tool, going through airport security, waiting in a rental car line or at a hotel check-in desk and filing an expense report make travel feel like a necessary evil. "Seventy-five percent of the time, I like [traveling]," said one woman who flies domestically 20 times or more a year. "The 25 percent [I don't like], it's not even because of my work. It's just bad timing that makes me stress."

In terms of convenient flight times and hotel locations, the gap between importance and effectiveness was almost a full point for both the female and male segments. For tools and memberships that allow travelers to bypass lines, the gap was one point for men and 1.3 points for women. For ease of expense reporting, the gap was nearly a full point for both.

Shrinking the Wellness Gap

Even factors that ranked middle of the road for both women and men can play an important part in traveler happiness. Under this umbrella are empowerment to attend to health and wellness and a feeling that the company supports the traveler's well-being and productivity.

One woman from Phoenix who works as a court librarian described the exhaustion she felt from a recent spate of travel. "We were just in Salt Lake last week. I have a mini-conference in Scottsdale, which is close, but I have to go to that next weekend. In two weeks, I'm going up to Flagstaff, which again is in-state, but still it's far. It's been a mess trying to do it," she said. "My voice is about three times deeper than normal because I got super sick. I usually don't do very badly on airplanes, but I've been traveling so much this year on the airplanes, being at the conference, being on the airplane again, I got the worst cold. You've got to go into work. I've basically been going to work and then coming home and laying on the bed."

Female travelers ranked the traveler's ability to attend to their health and the company's support for the traveler's well-being as more important than male travelers did. Yet both found their companies lacking in effectiveness in this area. That suggests this is an area where travel managers could work with HR to improve travelers' happiness.

When it comes to differences between male and female business travelers, however, it should be noted exactly what is being studied: the people who continue to travel on business. What about those who dropped out of the game? Only one-third of travelers who participated in the survey were women. What talent and what business is lost to lack of travel support on the road?

Traveler Perceptions on a Scale of 1 (bad) to 5 (good)