Last week my German team was engaging with suppliers and travel buyers at the VDR event in Dresden and since then I’ve been reconciling the direct feedback we heard in the field with the latest VDR Business Travel Analysis 2026. What we’re hearing are some clear trends that perfectly capture where the market is right now.
Travel is up. Spend is up. But cost per trip is down.
At first glance, that doesn’t quite add up. But in reality, it reflects something most organisations are already feeling.
They’re being asked to do more travel, in more places, with more people — but with tighter budgets, greater scrutiny, and far less margin for error.
That’s the new reality of business travel.
Travel isn’t being cut. It’s being justified.
There’s been a lot of talk over the past few years about whether business travel would ever fully return. This report answers that pretty clearly.
It has.
In fact, it’s growing — because in uncertain markets, proximity matters. Relationships matter. The ability to sit across the table from a customer, a partner, or a colleague is still a competitive advantage.
I know that from my experience as a sales leader.
But what has changed is the expectation around it.
Every trip now needs to prove its value. Trips are shorter. Planning is tighter. Choices are more deliberate. Travel is no longer routine — it’s intentional.
Your biggest savings lever isn’t price—it’s behaviour
One of the more telling insights in the report is how companies are responding.
They’re not cutting travel. They’re trying to get a grip on it.
The focus is shifting towards compliance, visibility, and better systems — not blanket restrictions.
That’s a subtle but important change.
It signals a move away from reactive cost-cutting and towards something more strategic.
Yet, many organisations are still struggling to answer the most basic but critical questions at the right moment: what are we actually spending, where are we losing control, and how do we make better decisions next time?
Consequently, travel managers focus heavily on negotiating rates, but this misses a bigger lever. If the trip itself was not the most effective choice, then the optimisation is happening in the wrong place. Questions to consider:
- How frequently is your organisation successfully booking those carefully-negotiated rates?
- Are they actually available from the airline, property or hotel chain? Are they loaded in your TMC’s booking tool?
- How are they presented to your travelers?
Emburse’s Travel Audit tools can arm you with data to ask these tough questions.
Travel managers aren’t controllers—they’re growth operators
What sits underneath all of this is a much bigger shift in responsibility.
Travel management is no longer just about booking trips or enforcing policy. It’s becoming a central point of control across cost, risk, and employee experience. It now touches everything from duty of care to mobility strategy to financial oversight.
That creates both an opportunity and a problem.
The opportunity is clear: done well, travel can drive growth, strengthen relationships, and support employee productivity.
Modern T&E systems should make this possible by bringing together booking, payment, expense, and policy into a single, coherent view—moving from isolated data points to real insight, and shifting from hindsight to foresight by using travel data as a real-time signal of how your business allocates capital and executes strategy.
The gap is no longer in policy. It’s in intelligence.
Most organisations do not have a policy problem; they have a timing problem.
By the time travel spend is reviewed, reported, and explained, it has already happened. The decision is locked in and the cost is sunk. This is where the real gap sits—not in compliance, but in intelligence.
Legacy systems were designed to report on the past. However, modern travel requires something different: the ability to influence decisions before they become costs.
Policies can create structure and set boundaries, but they only take effect after a decision has already been made. What organisations now need are guardrails—intelligence that guides decisions earlier, when they can still be influenced.
This is not about adding more compliance. It is about enabling earlier intervention. It is not about more reporting; it is about having real control in the moment. Emburse Assurance works alongside your existing rules to analyse receipts both before and after submission. It provides an Emburse AI-powered layer of detection that prevents errors, guides employees in real time, and helps finance and audit teams focus on real risk instead of post-travel audit noise.
As both travel and expense become more complex, relying on visibility after the fact is no longer enough. Control comes from shifting the conversation upstream, moving from reporting the past to actively controlling the present.
Final thought
Business travel is not going away. In fact, it is becoming more important.
In uncertain markets, where relationships matter most, travel continues to prove its value. At the same time, it is becoming more complex, more scrutinised, and more expensive to get wrong.
The organisations that succeed will not be those that simply manage travel more efficiently. They will be the ones who understand it more completely and turn their travel data into a strategic advantage.
When used effectively, travel data does more than show where money has been spent. It reveals how the business operates. It highlights where decisions are being made, where priorities are shifting, and where performance is accelerating or slowing down.
In this context, travel is no longer just a cost centre. It is a leading indicator of business performance, a source of insight, and ultimately, a decision engine for the organisation.