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When I skim through the questions on this site I notice that they are mainly focused on leisure travel. Moreover, many questions seems focused on budget and/or backpack travel. However, many people travel around the world for professional and business purposes. There is no question related on business travel and no such tag. If you are traveling for business, requirements and expectations are different from leisure travel.

Hence my question: Why is this so? Why are there no questions on this issue? Are these questions not welcome here or are they out of scope? Or do the owners want to give this forum a backpacker flair?

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    Seconding Ankur, there are plenty of questions about business travel, they're just not indicated as such, any more than the questions about budget travel are indicated as such. I happen to have asked 4 questions, 2 of which were about business trips and 2 about personal trips (budget if not necessarily hitch-hiking between hostels). Can you tell which are which? Does it matter?
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Nov 13, 2012 at 19:57

2 Answers 2

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We welcome any kind of travel questions. This site is not meant for backpackers or leisure travellers in particular.

The reason why we don't have a is because it's a 'meta' tag which does not reveal much about the nature of the question. We are here, as the FAQ states, to solve specific problems.

I would also counter by saying that while they may not explicitly state so, we have had many questions on sorting out visas for business travel, leisure activities in spare time during business travel, how to commute from airports to cities or vice versa, finding accommodation during conferences, flight/hotel rewards programmes, etc. These are all topics which are relevant to business travellers.

I do understand that we have a more dominent backpacker vibe. But I also think we are doing a good job of answering questions - rather than single-focus forums such as FlyerTalk or Lonely Planet's Thorn Tree. (Sometimes, we even link to answers there since they may be the best.)

If you have any suggestions on increasing engagement with any particular sector of travellers you think this site is not addressing, feel free to engage with the community on this! We are always happy to listen. :)

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    Yes I think a lot of the questions about airports, airport transfers, and layovers within the US especially tend to be business travel questions here. But please feel free to ask more! As long as your questions are about the travel and not the business it's exactly what we want here (-:
    – hippietrail
    Nov 5, 2012 at 4:34
  • Thanks for sharing your thoughts :-)
    – user3470
    Nov 5, 2012 at 18:12
  • Should it mean, that question about longer-time accomodation, such as room/appartment search should also be on topic?
    – Danubian Sailor
    Nov 17, 2012 at 20:53
  • @lechlukasz It depends. If it's for the purpose of travel, then yes. If it's for the purpose of immigration, then no.
    – Ankur Banerjee
    Nov 17, 2012 at 21:02
  • but when it comes to the business travel... the delegation can be for a few months, and it is still the business travel, or not?
    – Danubian Sailor
    Nov 17, 2012 at 21:03
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    @lechlukasz Yes, it's still business travel. I'd say it could be judged objectively along this criteria: do you get a visa that classifies you as a permanent resident of the country? (This doesn't necessarily mean you're allowed to stay forever; for instance, many student visas are considered 'permanent resident' even when time-limited. It's a technical difference.) If the answer to that question is yes, that counts as immigration and won't be allowed on this site. Everything else is fine.
    – Ankur Banerjee
    Nov 17, 2012 at 21:08
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I agree with Marcel here. As @Ankur mentioned business travel questions get attention, but they are more prone to be closed the leisure question. Take for example this parking in london question and compare it with this poster-in-Berlin and Posters-in-Paris, questions. I asked all three and in principle they are quite similar to each other. You are going to place and you need some specific information that is not in the yellowpages or a travel guide. Still the poster questions got closed and the parking question got quite some answer.

I think it boils down to the population on travel.se and the dynamics that comes with that population. I am afraid that people recognize the need for outside parking spaces to continue to the citycenter, but the majority of users here don't recognize the specificity of posters and traveling. I assume the basic assumption is that you just need to go to any printing shop and get it printed. They just don't recognize the situation that it often takes 2 days to get these posters printed, which is time you typically don't have.

So to answer your question. To get more business travel answers, we should first start having questions the current population recognizes as a travel question.

Btw I think the three question I mentioned here are pretty close to being a shopping question, but that applies to quite some other questions here as well.

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