If you’ve worked in communications for some time, you’ll be familiar with the scenario of the European business day trip.

Set alarm for an ungodly hour. Transfer to airport in the dark. Perhaps break into a light jog to the gate. Flight delayed by fog. Taxi in foreign land to an office in the suburbs, in the dark. Spend day in windowless meeting room. Retrace steps home in the evening, in the dark, potentially with flight delay.

Jetting off to another city for the day may have initially seemed glamorous, but for those who’ve spent years doing it regularly, it likely rapidly lost its shine.

According to new analysis this week, the days of the same-day business day trip may be numbered though. Lockdowns and travel restrictions may have forced the change, but many firms are apparently now doing their best to avoid such meetings given the reduction in carbon emissions and costs that can be achieved by employees flying less often - and instead making business travel a multi-day affair, when being there in person may make more of a difference. From an ESG perspective, the contribution towards carbon reduction goals is an obvious benefit, but so might be the employee wellbeing advantages that can come with not having to spend so much time abroad.

The Global Business Travel Association released data this week that projects business travel expenditure will not return to pre-pandemic levels for another three years, but also outlined that the decline of the day trip was a “new normal” for carbon emissions, delay frustration and new work pattern reasons.

Several large professional services firms have already committed to large reductions in day trips, instead focusing on multi-day meetings.

And another set of figures earlier this year showed that the volume of business travel on flights to and from the UK had dropped by a third since 2019.

For anyone who has just experienced Europe’s airports during the summer season peak - whether for holiday or work purposes - the prospect of better but less frequent business travel may be a welcome one.

But this does all fly (pun intended) in the face of earlier reports on the state of business travel, which suggested that many large companies have not yet factored reduced executive travel into their carbon reduction plans, and in fact many business trips are now being undertaken pretty much as they were before COVID-19 struck. Those reports were largely courtesy of a survey by a non-profit organisation with an interest in reducing frequent flying, but nonetheless it pointed to four in five firms not having a clear policy to cut the number of business flights and the resulting emissions.

What seems to be happening is companies are moving away from day trips as a by-product of a more video call-centric culture rather than a low-travel policy, because it is broadly effective and so reduces the need to spend the best part of a day schlepping to meet people for a couple of hours. In many cases, the idea of actually travelling there and back same-day may not even occur to us.

If my recent experiences are anything to go by, the default assumption for a meeting in Europe is that it will be online, unless the focus is as much on building relationships with new people as it is on the content.

We may not have seen the back of 20-hour days for a couple of hours of face-to-face time just yet. But as companies do more to quantify and report on emissions, and common sense prevails for meeting planning, we may at least see less desire for the day trip just for the sake of it.