I was flying all the time for 5 years because our partners, investors, clients etc demanded it. I had many weeks in those years where someone mailed on sunday that I was expected tuesday morning in HK and thursday in melbourne and then could be gone sunday. I live in EU so that's a nice haul for 1 week of business; quite painful with some kind of permanent jetlag.

Then COVID arrived and now suddenly everything is easy over zoom, email & chat. Even now that travel is allowed again in a lot of places I was supposed to jump to inside EU, no-one asks for it anymore. Saves everyone bucketloads of money (I wasn't sitting in economy), much better for the environment, and, for most purposes that the travel was thought to be vital for, it's actually more efficient this way. People are well rested and progress is made faster as people are less likely to fall into the bullshit of lengthy business lunches/dinners and late night drinks (basically getting hammered which in some circles was mandatory otherwise they wouldn't play) etc. Most of the people I work with (and have worked with for years) don't assume they or I will have to fly, when it's allowed again, more than once a year. And I don't miss it; it was really tiring.

I doubt this. I’ve worked on and off remotely and with distributed teams for most of my career. For many of us, there is something severely missing when remote-only. It’s only been a few months. I don’t believe we’ve had a paradigm-shifting breakthrough in the nature or office life. I think what’s going on is 1) tech companies are taking a good opportunity to diversify out of the long overpriced SV labor and real estate markets, and 2) companies trying to keep a stiff upper lip and show how adaptive they are by appearing to embrace the “new normal.”

That Zoom icon is going to still be there on the desktop of all these computers and that’s one good thing to come out of this.

Can you explain specifically what you makes you think that there will be heavy demand for travel, based on some facts?