Fears of another global recession are holding up recovery in the business travel sector, say members of the industry at the Business Travel Show in Dubai. The two-day event returned to the emirate this week after last year's show was cancelled as companies imposed travel bans and cut their budgets. "There are still concerns that we will be facing another recession," said Chris Crowley, the president of the Association of Corporate Travel Executives (ACTE), adding that such fears were holding back the industry. "The overall trend is encouraging without being exciting," he said. The consensus at the show was that business travel was recovering but had yet to return to its peaks. Hamida Lalani, the office manager for Azura, a company based in Dubai that specialises in selling watches, said her travel budget had been cut substantially. "We need to cut costs wherever we can," she said. "You feel that there might be another downturn." The business travel segment is particularly important for tourism industries, with business visitors usually spending more than tourists. "Slowly, slowly, it's coming back," said Carol Maddison, the UAE manager at VisitBritain, adding that business travel had yet to return to pre-recession levels. "I think corporate travellers are still not travelling so much and they tend to be travelling in a lower class. Before [companies] might have sent 10 executives, now they're sending only three and four." The UAE was a particularly important target market for the UK, Ms Maddison said. The average amount visitors from the Gulf region spent last year while in the UK was £1,733 (Dh10,104) per person, more than three times as much as the average visitor, according to VisitBritain. "The UAE and the wider Middle East have had a long association with the UK. There are a lot of companies that have their head offices in the UK and they travel back and forth quite often," said Ms Maddison. Hoteliers in the UAE agreed that business travel was showing signs of improvement. "We have gone through two years of everybody downsizing travel policies," said Guy Epsom, the director of business development at Moevenpick Hotels and Resorts in Dubai. "Businesses are beginning to do well again and I think this will reverberate to us. I don't think we're flying yet but we will be." Others seemed more cautious. "What we're finding is that 'demand' perhaps is still a bit of a strong word but people are deciding to book much later than we have previously seen," said Andrew Fyfe, Virgin Atlantic's regional manager, Middle East and the Indian subcontinent. "In the past we've enjoyed filling the aircraft from the front to the back but the dynamics have changed over the last couple of years. We still have pretty good load factors in the front end of the aircraft but they're not as full as they were two years ago and that's because of the economic crisis. "I think we need another three or four months to gauge whether going [into] 2011 is going to be better than 2010. I think there's a hesitation that it might be subdued." The Dubai show organisers Centaur Travel Group said companies were starting to increase their travel budgets. "Last year we took the view with the market as it would be wrong to go out asking suppliers for money when they were having such a tough time," said Mike Sherrard, the company's managing director.