Coronavirus: Big firms imposing tougher travel, meeting restrictions than govt

Big firms are clamping down on business travel. Photo / Getty Images

A growing number of large New Zealand companies are starting to impose domestic travel bans, restrictions on meeting attendance and are even considering preventing staff from moving off the floors they normally work on.

While reluctant to name names, Business New Zealand chief executive Kirk Hope told BusinessDesk that "some of the examples I am aware of... are companies with more than $100 million turnover."

Among those are understood to be the major trading banks, some of which have already moved either to ban non-essential domestic travel or to require all travel requests to be approved by senior managers.

The international travel restrictions announced by the government on Saturday rule out almost all short international business trips, since executives and other employees will be required to self-isolate for 14 days on return to New Zealand. That requirement, said to be one of the toughest imposed by any country seeking to stem the tide of new coronavirus infections, will be in place for 16 days, with review and potential extension at March 30. Australia announced similar measures shortly after New Zealand.

National telecommunications provider Spark confirmed it escalated its travel instructions to staff on Friday to require that only "business-critical" trips be taken domestically or internationally.

Such restrictions on large swathes of the corporate travelling public bodes ill for Air New Zealand, since that segment of the market is its most profitable and the national carrier is already reeling from plunging international bookings, with services being reduced on an ongoing basis. Further international service cuts appear inevitable in the wake of the government's latest announcements.

Hope said Business NZ was also seeing increasing numbers of companies giving staff the option to work from home, if they preferred to.

"Most of that will be employee-driven," he said.

- BusinessDesk