I don’t travel for business in my current job, but did a lot of it previously in my career. The vast majority of my business travel could technically have been handled by video conferencing. But we didn’t do it that way, because people value the “human touch.” Going out to dinner, shaking hands, taking plant tours, whispering during meetings, all the unofficial stuff that comprises a huge percentage of human communication. So I suspect it will come back with a vengeance when (and if) the virus situation resolves itself.
Hell, I haven’t done a business trip (even a conference) in over a decade and that that’s before Covid. Kind of sucks really. I’d like the networking opportunity.
I used to travel about once a month (stopped in early March). Some of the work I do has to happen in person, and I expect travel to return in some form someday.
I voted for expecting travel to resume at some point for me specifically. My team doesn’t really travel very much in general, but we’re split over three locations and it makes sense for us to get together periodically for release planning and other project setup work. If there were no concerns about a pandemic I wouldn’t expect this need to go away. For our week-to-week business video/phone meetings are sufficient and that was true before the pandemic anyway.
So, for me I expect things to go back to normal, but mostly because normal involved only a small amount of travel (maybe one every two months for me) and mostly virtual stuff anyway. I could see a different organization with a lot of travel discovering the virtual stuff was good enough and making that stick.