“The grey areas surrounding bleisure and workations are increasingly disappearing: the first white paper from the German initaitive Blend_it! shows how the combination of business and private travel is evolving, what challenges companies and providers still face, and what steps are now necessary.”
“The demand is there. The task now is to turn individual, ad-hoc solutions into reliable structures,” explains Jens Schließmann, Chief Executive of the business travel association VDR, which founded the Blend_it! initiative in 2025 together with the GCB. As a first major milestone, the initiative’s inaugural summit therefore took place in Frankfurt am Main in July 2026 (as we reported).
The latest research findings presented there by the Bleisure & Workation Monitor research group (IU University of Applied Sciences) and the BZT (Bavarian Centre for Tourism) form part of the white paper ‘Blended Travel – Impulses for Companies and Providers in the Business Travel Market’, which is now available; it also outlines the opportunities and challenges in the fields of travel management, human resources, the hotel industry, destinations and mobility providers – as well as the eleven areas for action developed by the approximately 70 participants.
“Bleisure and workation have now become perennial topics in travel management,” emphasised Oliver Bransch, Senior Manager and authorised signatory at PwC Germany and a member of the VDR Executive Committee, at the white paper launch this week. Among other things, he outlined six courses of action in the areas of governance & compliance, policy & standards, and processes & systems (OBE – end-to-end, TMC, expense management, etc.), as well as organisation within travel, HR, legal and finance, communication, and strategy & value creation in the form of benefits and market solutions. “Bleisure requires fewer special arrangements and more integrated standards,” Oliver Bransch noted.
The initiative plans to follow up with further studies in the coming months. Among other things, an analysis of the travel behaviour of international business travellers from key source markets to Germany is currently being carried out by IU University. A legal guide, practical guidance for companies and further webinars are also planned. All information and the white paper are available here.
Photos: Konzack, Blend_it
