Virtual Meetings

What Are Virtual Meetings?

Virtual meetings are meetings held over video, audio, or web-conferencing technology instead of in a shared physical space. Participants join from separate locations using a laptop, phone, or meeting room system, and the software carries voice, video, and shared content in real time.

The term covers a range of formats: a quick one-on-one video call, a recurring team stand-up, a client presentation with screen sharing, and a large webinar or town hall with hundreds of attendees. Some virtual meetings stand alone. Others are the remote half of a hybrid meeting that also has people in a physical room.

For business travel programs, virtual meetings matter because they compete directly with the trip itself. Every meeting a company can hold virtually is a flight, hotel night, and set of per diem expenses that never gets booked. Knowing when a video call genuinely substitutes for travel, and when it doesn’t, is now a standard part of corporate travel policy.

What’s the Difference Between Virtual, Remote, and Hybrid Meetings?

The terms often get used interchangeably, but they describe different setups.

• Virtual meeting: Every participant joins remotely through video or audio software. No one is in a shared physical room.
• Remote meeting: A broader term for any meeting where at least one participant isn’t physically present. A remote meeting can be entirely virtual or a mix of in-person and remote attendees.
• Hybrid meeting: Some participants sit together in a conference room while others join by video from elsewhere. Hybrid meetings need more coordination, since cameras, microphones, and shared screens all have to be set up so remote attendees aren’t left following a muffled conversation.

How Do Companies Decide Between a Virtual Meeting and a Business Trip?

The decision is rarely all-or-nothing. Most travel policies build in a threshold: below a certain deal size or seniority level, a virtual meeting is the default, and above it, travel needs a specific business case.

A 2025 GBTA return-on-investment study found that U.S. companies are underinvesting in business travel and expense by 8.3% relative to the level that would maximize sales, a gap that has grown steadily since 2010 despite years of expanding remote-meeting adoption. GBTA’s analysis concluded that this technology hasn’t closed that gap on its own [1]. In practice, that means the trips companies keep booking, such as client kickoffs, contract renewals, and site visits before a major purchase, still generate returns that a video call doesn’t fully replicate.

Travel volume isn’t static, though. A separate GBTA poll from mid-2025 found that 24% of companies had shifted meetings or events online in response to rising travel disruption and cost pressure, up from 19% earlier the same year [2]. That shift tends to hit discretionary and lower-stakes meetings first: internal check-ins, routine vendor calls, and early-stage prospect conversations. High-stakes moments, like contract signings and first meetings with a major account, still tend to pull people onto a plane.

Best Practices for Running Effective Virtual Meetings

Distributed teams that run these meetings well tend to share a few habits.

Keep the invite list tight. Every added attendee raises coordination cost and increases the odds that part of the group multitasks instead of contributing. If someone only needs the outcome, send notes instead of an invite.

Assign a single owner for the agenda and the outcome. A virtual meeting without a named owner tends to drift, since there’s no shared physical cue, like people packing up, to signal it’s time to wrap.

Default to cameras on for meetings under roughly eight people. Video keeps engagement higher for small, discussion-heavy meetings. For larger webinars or town halls, cameras become optional and the focus shifts to a single presenter feed.

Record sessions and share notes for time zone gaps. Teams managing spend and coordination for distributed teams already juggle overlapping time zones for travel and budgeting. Meetings should follow the same logic: not everyone can attend live, and a recording plus a short written summary keeps the rest of the team aligned.

Set a hard stop time. Meetings without a clear end tend to run long, since there’s no equivalent of a room booking ending or a shuttle waiting outside.

When Should You Choose an In-Person Meeting Instead of a Virtual One?

This format works well for status updates, structured check-ins, and conversations where the content matters more than the relationship. In-person meetings still win in a few specific situations.

Contract negotiations and renewals. Pricing and terms discussions with real financial stakes benefit from reading a room, something video calls still handle poorly.

First meetings with a major new account. Early trust-building moves faster in person, particularly for large enterprise deals where the buyer is taking on real risk by switching vendors.

Team offsites and culture-building. No video call replicates the informal conversations that happen over a shared meal or a team offsite. Companies that skip in-person time entirely tend to see it show up later as weaker cross-team collaboration.

Situations where travel risk needs active management. Choosing a virtual meeting instead of a trip also sidesteps the duty of care planning tied to travel in unfamiliar or higher-risk locations, which matters when a company is building its annual travel budget and weighing trip volume against risk exposure.

When a trip does make sense, most finance and travel and expense teams still want the same visibility into cost and purpose that they’d apply to any other spend decision, whether the meeting happens on a screen or in a conference room.

Sources

[1] Global Business Travel Association (GBTA), "U.S. Firms Could Unlock $2.4 Trillion in Sales by Optimizing Business Travel," 2025. https://gbta.org/u-s-firms-could-unlock-2-4-trillion-in-sales-by-optimizing-business-travel-new-gbta-study-finds/

[2] Global Business Travel Association (GBTA), "Global Business Travel Industry Sentiment Continues to Reflect Ongoing Uncertainty and Change Amid U.S. Government Actions," 2025. https://gbta.org/global-business-travel-industry-sentiment-continues-to-reflect-ongoing-uncertainty-and-change-amid-u-s-government-actions/

Related Terms

• Bleisure travel: The blending of business and leisure travel, often supported by the same flexible, remote-friendly work patterns that make video-first collaboration possible.
• MICE: Meetings, incentives, conferences, and exhibitions, the broader category of group gatherings that virtual meetings sometimes replace and sometimes complement.
• Corporate negotiated rate: A discounted hotel rate a company negotiates in advance, relevant once a decision favors an in-person trip over a video call.