A company can hold a meeting with employees in New York, London, and Singapore without paying for a single plane ticket. Video calls are routine, cloud documents keep everyone working from the same files, and AI can now summarize meetings, draft follow-up notes, and handle an expanding list of administrative tasks. From a purely technical perspective, there has never been less need to put everybody on an airplane.
Yet companies continue doing exactly that. Global business travel spending was projected by the Global Business Travel Association to reach roughly $1.57 trillion in 2025, exceeding pre-pandemic spending in nominal terms. The pattern has changed, however. Businesses are becoming more selective about which trips deserve the money, and that helps explain why a three-day gathering that costs thousands of dollars per employee can still survive an era of Zoom calls and artificial intelligence.
Business Travel Has Become More Deliberate
The modern business trip increasingly has to justify itself. Deloitte's 2025 Corporate Travel Study found that 74 percent of surveyed travel managers expected their budgets to increase that year, but companies were also paying closer attention to costs and return on investment. Fifty-four percent of the travel managers surveyed named cost as one of the three biggest factors restricting travel, up from 48 percent the previous year.
That combination creates an interesting situation. Companies have not abandoned travel, but many are becoming more particular about why people travel. Deloitte found that connecting with outside stakeholders, developing new business, attending conferences, and meeting clients or partners face to face remained important drivers of corporate trips. Nearly two-thirds of surveyed business travelers expected to attend a conference during 2025.
Training is becoming another major reason to get people together. Deloitte reported that two-thirds of surveyed travel managers said spending on training and learning-related travel was increasing, compared with 54 percent in the previous year's survey. As companies introduce new technologies and employees learn unfamiliar tools, gathering people in the same place can turn a training exercise into something more interactive than another webinar running in a browser tab.
Costs also make companies think differently about the schedule once employees arrive. When airfare, hotels, ground transportation, meals, and working time are included, a meeting involving dozens of employees can quickly become a significant investment. The result is pressure to make those gatherings accomplish things that would be harder to achieve remotely, rather than flying everyone somewhere simply to sit through presentations they could have watched online.
Some Conversations Still Work Differently Face To Face
Videoconferencing has solved an enormous logistical problem, but researchers have found that communicating through a screen does not always reproduce the dynamics of sitting across from another person. A 2022 study published in Nature examined pairs collaborating both face to face and over video. The researchers found that videoconferencing groups generated fewer creative ideas, although the virtual format did not appear to hurt their ability to select an idea once those ideas had been generated.
Later research has continued examining the differences among communication formats. A 2024 Scientific Reports study compared face-to-face communication, traditional video conferencing, and virtual reality in workplace-style interactions, looking at factors including creativity, fatigue, group flow, and decision-making. Its findings reinforced the broader point that communication technology changes how people interact rather than simply recreating an in-person conversation electronically.
That distinction matters most when a meeting is not really about transferring information. A quarterly update can be delivered electronically. A difficult negotiation, strategy workshop, brainstorming session, leadership retreat, or first meeting between teams may depend much more heavily on spontaneous questions, side conversations, and the ability to read a room.
Gallup has similarly argued that organizations should use office time intentionally. Its workplace research recommends focusing in-person time on activities such as complex collaboration, relationship building, mentoring, coaching, and team development rather than requiring employees to commute merely to perform the same individual work they could have done elsewhere. That logic can extend naturally to business travel.
Remote Work Did Not Make Offices Or Gatherings Obsolete
None of this means companies need employees sitting together five days a week. In fact, one of the largest experiments on hybrid work produced evidence for almost the opposite conclusion. Researchers studying 1,612 Trip.com employees found that allowing people to work from home two days a week reduced quit rates by one-third without harming performance evaluations, promotions, or the amount of code produced by engineers.
That study helps explain why corporate travel and hybrid work can coexist. Employees do not necessarily need constant physical proximity to remain productive. Instead, businesses can separate work that travels well through a laptop from work that benefits disproportionately from physical presence.
For a distributed company, that might mean employees spend most of the year working from different cities but meet several times for planning, training, or team-building. The travel bill can look substantial when considered by itself. The company may nevertheless view a concentrated gathering as preferable to paying for permanent offices or requiring employees to relocate.
The distinction is increasingly between everyday work and high-value moments. Routine reporting, document editing, scheduling, and many project updates are relatively easy to handle remotely. Meetings involving trust, mentoring, negotiation, complicated collaboration, or relationship development provide a stronger argument for bringing people together.
This also explains why conferences remain resilient. A conference lets an employee meet customers, suppliers, competitors, prospective partners, and colleagues during the same trip. Deloitte noted that smaller organizations in particular can use live events as an efficient way to interact with multiple stakeholders within a few days.
AI May Make Human Meetings More Selective, Not Extinct
Artificial intelligence adds another layer to the calculation. Microsoft reported in its 2026 Work Trend Index that it surveyed 20,000 AI-using workers across 10 countries while also analyzing anonymized Microsoft 365 productivity signals. The company's research describes AI agents increasingly taking on execution-oriented work while people spend more time directing tasks, making decisions, and taking responsibility for outcomes.
That does not automatically reduce the value of people meeting each other. In some situations, it may make the purpose of those meetings clearer. If software can summarize a call, produce the first version of a presentation, search through internal documents, organize information, and draft follow-up material, employees have less reason to travel merely to exchange information.
The remaining reasons are much more human. Executives may gather to debate which direction a company should take. Sales teams may visit customers because the relationship itself matters. Newly combined teams may meet because people who barely know each other have to establish ways of working together.
AI can also remove some of the administrative friction surrounding these gatherings. Meeting summaries and searchable transcripts can make it easier to capture decisions after everyone leaves, while digital collaboration tools can keep projects moving between physical meetings. The result is not necessarily a contest between technology and business travel. Companies can use each for the work it handles best.
That approach could also help solve one of the persistent frustrations of corporate travel. Nobody particularly enjoys spending half a day crossing a continent for a meeting that turns out to be a presentation followed by questions that could have been handled online. As remote tools improve, those low-value trips become harder to defend.
The Expensive Meeting Now Has To Earn Its Keep
Corporate travel still represents an enormous market, but the headline spending numbers require some context. GBTA estimated that global business travel spending reached $1.47 trillion in 2024 and would rise to approximately $1.57 trillion in 2025. After adjusting for inflation, however, the organization estimated that 2025 spending would still remain about 14 percent below its 2019 level in real terms.
In other words, record spending does not necessarily mean companies have simply recreated the business-travel habits of 2019. Prices have changed, travel patterns have shifted, and organizations are under pressure to demonstrate that expensive trips accomplish something valuable.
Deloitte's survey captures that tension. Most surveyed travel managers were still expanding budgets in 2025, while larger organizations showed more signs of restraint and companies increasingly focused on costs, sustainability, and measurable returns from travel. Live events, training, client engagement, and business development remained among the activities attracting travel dollars.
That may be the clearest explanation for why companies continue paying thousands of dollars to put employees in the same room. The office did not defeat remote work, and video calls did not eliminate business travel. Instead, businesses are gradually learning that different kinds of work benefit from different environments.
A routine update probably does not deserve an airline ticket. A major strategy session, customer relationship, training program, or gathering of a distributed team sometimes does. In the era of AI and hybrid work, the question is no longer whether employees can meet remotely. It is whether being together creates enough additional value to justify the trip.
