Everyone is tacking fun onto their business trips

They say never mix business with pleasure...but nothing is stopping you from combining business with leisure.

Known as “bleisure travel,” because everything needs a cutesy name, it’s the portmanteau to describe the act of tacking extra days onto the end of a work trip, bringing a friend along for a conference, or really anything that adds fun to stodgy business travel. Bleisure travel existed long before the pandemic—it was coined in 2009 by the business consulting group Future Laboratory—but it exploded in the aftermath, thanks to more jobs offering remote or hybrid positions that can be done anywhere:

• Eighty-three percent of American business travelers at least occasionally turn a work trip into leisure, per a survey from the travel app Skyscanner.
• The same survey showed that 42% of travelers add one or two days onto business trips, a sign that people are staying in a city after their business is concluded.
• Nearly 40% of corporate buyers reported that business trips were growing in length, a sign that personal time is becoming a bigger part of work travel, according to a Global Business Travel Association survey.

Gen Z loves it: Nearly two-thirds of the youngest workers who travel for business are taking part in bleisure, according to a 2025 Harris Poll survey. Meanwhile, nine in 10 Zoomers see the trips as a chance to elevate their lifestyle (e.g., upgrading to first class or switching to a more luxurious hotel), per Hotels.com.

Top spots: According to Booking.com research, the best destinations for bleisure travel are New Orleans, followed by Las Vegas, Orlando, Boston, and Washington, DC.

Here to stay: Forbes reported that the bleisure market was worth $685 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $1.7 trillion by 2032.—DL