Despite rising costs, business travel is not disappearing, but it is absolutely becoming harder to justify casually. For smaller companies, that may be the most important change in the post-pandemic travel market.
Airfare, lodging, ground transportation, and time away from normal work now represent a serious investment, especially when the same meeting could technically happen on a screen. Yet even with remote technology, the latest data suggests that business travel remains essential, even for small businesses. But big or small, every business now must become much more deliberate about what a trip is supposed to accomplish.
That's because, no matter how you look at it, travel is simply more expensive than it was even just a few years ago. The Global Business Travel Association expects worldwide spending to reach $1.71 trillion in 2026, up 7.2%, while trip volume rises only 1.3% to about 1.84 billion. For smaller firms, the gap means travel budgets can grow much faster than travel activity.
The Business Trip Has To Earn Its Keep
For years, business travel was treated as a normal operating expense in many industries. Salespeople visited accounts, executives attended conferences, and teams gathered because that was how business was conducted. Video meetings changed that baseline by making many routine interactions possible without anyone leaving home.
The important question now is not whether virtual work can replace travel. It plainly can replace some of it. The more useful question is what an in-person trip can achieve that a call cannot, and whether that advantage is valuable enough to justify the cost.
Deloitte’s 2025 Corporate Travel Study found companies increasingly focused on return, including pre-trip assessments of whether a journey is justified and likely to produce a specific business outcome. Cost ranked among the top three constraints on travel for 54% of surveyed travel managers. The pressure is pushing trip approval closer to an investment decision.
That calculation becomes more urgent when prices rise faster than trip volume. GBTA said in July 2026 that business travel prices were expected to remain elevated through the rest of the year before moderating in 2027, with higher energy, labor, transportation, and operating costs contributing to the pressure. A company that once approved a trip because it was customary now has a stronger reason to ask what the trip is expected to produce.
For a small business, that can lead to a simple but powerful change in mindset. Travel stops being a category of spending and starts being a strategic investment. A trip to renew a major client, close a complicated deal, meet several prospects at one conference, train a team on a new system, or solve a problem on site is easier to defend than a trip built around a meeting that could have been an hour-long video call.
Smaller Companies Are Still Getting On Planes
If the story ended with rising costs, small-business travel would be easy to predict. Companies would simply cut trips. The data suggests something more complicated is happening.
American Express Global Business Travel and Ipsos surveyed leaders at U.S. businesses with 20 to 500 employees and U.K. firms with 10 to 250 employees in October 2025. In the United States, 98% of respondents said their company had sent employees on domestic or international work trips during the previous year. That was up from 91% in a January survey, while the comparable U.K. figure rose from 93% to 94%. The research indicates that small and midsize firms continued putting people on the road even as the economics of travel became more demanding.
The same survey found that 82% of U.S. SMEs and 84% of U.K. SMEs considered increasing opportunities for face-to-face interactions with clients and prospects over the following year to be very or fairly important. That is a strong signal that smaller businesses still see physical presence as commercially useful, even after years of widespread video conferencing. The meeting may be harder to justify, but it has not lost its value.
Other research points in the same direction. A Euromonitor International study commissioned by Navan estimated that businesses with one to 200 employees represented 26.1% of the business travel market in 2024 and projected 7.1% annual growth through 2029. It also reported that SMBs had one of the highest average travel frequencies per employee among the segments examined.
Small companies have a particular reason to remain visible. A conference, site visit, or customer meeting can serve several purposes at once when a firm does not have a large sales or research organization. That does not make every flight productive. It means the right trip can combine sales, market research, relationship management, recruiting, and learning.
The Trips That Survive Have A Clear Job To Do
One of the clearest changes in business travel is the growing distinction between trips that merely move people and trips that create concentrated value. Smaller firms have an incentive to favor the second kind because they have fewer people and less money to spread across low-impact travel. The best use cases are increasingly the ones that combine a clear business objective with something that is difficult to reproduce remotely.
Deloitte found that live events remained a major driver of corporate travel in its 2025 research, with nearly two-thirds of surveyed business travelers expecting to attend a conference. The study also found smaller companies were more likely than larger ones to cite increased event attendance as a driver of travel growth and to report higher conference spending. Deloitte’s interpretation was straightforward: for organizations with fewer employees and smaller budgets, events can provide an efficient way to meet multiple stakeholders over several days.
Training is another category gaining weight. Deloitte reported that more than half of the smaller companies in its survey placed training among their top three drivers of travel growth, and one in four ranked it first. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that 85% of surveyed employers expected to prioritize upskilling their workforce as technology changes the skills companies need.
The logic for a small firm is compelling. If a company has ten people instead of ten thousand, sending two employees to learn a new technical process, meet suppliers, or understand an emerging market can influence a significant share of the organization. The payoff can also spread beyond the travelers if they return with contacts, knowledge, and training they can share internally.
The same principle applies to sales and relationship building. McKinsey noted in its analysis of emerging business-travel trends that companies continue to value face-to-face engagement even as digital tools improve, and it highlighted technology that can bring more structure to unmanaged travel at smaller firms. That suggests a practical filter for travel: use the screen for routine information exchange and reserve the trip for situations where context, trust, observation, or relationship building can materially improve the result. It is a narrower definition of necessary travel, but potentially a more valuable one.
Hybrid Work Changed What Face Time Is For
The rise of hybrid work did not eliminate the need to meet. It changed what a worthwhile meeting looks like. When people already spend much of the week collaborating through screens, the bar for asking them to travel should be higher than simply recreating another day of digital work in a different building.
Gallup reported that as of May 2026, 52% of U.S. employees with remote-capable jobs worked in a hybrid arrangement, while 26% worked exclusively remotely and 22% worked on site. Those percentages have been relatively stable, which makes distributed work look less like a temporary adjustment and more like a durable part of the operating environment. That permanence changes the role of the occasional in-person gathering.
Gallup’s broader research on hybrid teams emphasizes using in-person time for work that is harder to do apart, including collaboration, feedback, team building, and complex tasks. Bringing people together only to have them sit separately on laptops misses much of the point. The meeting has to justify the travel around it.
That has important implications for a small company with employees in several cities. A quarterly gathering can be more valuable than a stream of routine office visits if the agenda is designed around decisions, training, planning, customer work, and relationship building that benefit from being together. The trip becomes a concentrated period of high-value interaction rather than an attempt to recreate ordinary office life somewhere else.
It also changes how companies should think about conferences. Sending an employee to watch presentations that will later be posted online is difficult to defend on that basis alone. Sending the same employee with a prepared list of customers, partners, recruits, vendors, and peers to meet can turn the conference into several trips compressed into one.
Trip compression may become a defining habit of cost-conscious travel. When airfare and hotel costs are high, a stronger itinerary produces several useful encounters from the same fixed expense. For small businesses, the objective is not necessarily fewer miles. It is more business value per mile.
AI Is Making Travel Easier And More Complicated
Artificial intelligence is also changing the business trip, although not only in the obvious way. AI can reduce the administrative work around travel, but it is simultaneously creating new questions about governance, privacy, and which tools employees are allowed to use. For smaller companies, both sides of that equation matter because efficiency gains are valuable, but there may be fewer specialist staff available to supervise new systems.
SAP Concur’s 2026 Global Business Travel Survey found that 75% of surveyed business travelers were already using AI-powered tools to support some part of their trips. It also found that 72% had used or would use unapproved AI tools for planning or booking, while 85% of surveyed CFOs were concerned about that behavior. Adoption is moving faster than many companies’ policies.
The attraction is understandable. Travelers told SAP Concur they wanted AI integrated into workflows and booking alerts, while travel managers prioritized duty-of-care, compliance, and risk tools. A separate 2026 GBTA study found 92% of surveyed travel buyers were interested in predictive analytics for travel-spend forecasting and 89% in automated disruption management and rebooking.
For a small company, these capabilities can matter precisely because there may be no dedicated travel department. The employee booking the flight may also be managing a client, preparing the presentation, approving invoices, or running part of the business. Tools that reduce searching, rebooking, receipt handling, or policy checking can give time back to people whose attention is scarce.
But convenience is not the same as control. A small business still needs rules about which AI systems can receive company information, who approves bookings, what happens when an automated recommendation conflicts with policy, and how expenses are reviewed. AI may make a lean travel program possible without creating a large bureaucracy, but the companies that benefit most are likely to be the ones that add simple guardrails before employees invent their own.
JLco Julia Amaral, Shutterstock
Younger Professionals Are Rewriting The Travel Deal
The next generation of business travelers is not rejecting work travel, but it is approaching it with different expectations. Younger employees appear interested in the career benefits of getting on the road while also expecting more say in how those trips are planned and managed. That combination gives small employers an opportunity to make travel purposeful without treating flexibility as an afterthought.
SAP Concur’s 2025 survey of 3,750 business travelers found Gen Z and millennial employees were more likely than older groups to say their travel frequency differed from what they wanted. Younger travelers were also more open to AI-enabled booking, at 92% of Gen Z and 90% of millennials, compared with 80% of Gen X and 71% of baby boomers. A modern travel policy therefore has to account for different expectations inside the same workforce.
The opportunity side is important too. In a separate 2026 U.S. survey conducted for SAP Concur, 83% of Gen Z respondents and 86% of millennials said business travel creates professional opportunity. At the same time, 64% of Gen Z employees said business travel felt out of reach in their current role, suggesting that access to trips can itself become part of how younger employees experience career development.
Flexibility is also becoming part of the conversation. GBTA reported in late 2025 that 43% of travel programs surveyed had clearly defined policies for blended or “bleisure” travel, while another 28% handled it informally or case by case. Among travel buyers, 71% cited employee satisfaction and 68% cited work-life balance as benefits of allowing business and leisure to be combined, although duty of care, expense boundaries, and insurance were common concerns.
For smaller businesses competing for talent, these expectations are difficult to dismiss. A sensible travel policy increasingly has to answer not only what the company will pay for, but how much flexibility employees have, which tools they can use, how personal extensions are handled, and whether travel opportunities are distributed fairly. The trip is becoming part of the employment experience as well as a line on the expense report.
The Smartest Travel Policy May Be A Short One
Small businesses do not need to imitate the travel departments of multinational corporations. In fact, their advantage can be the opposite: fewer layers, faster decisions, and a policy built around a handful of clear principles. A lightweight system can still be disciplined if everyone understands why the company travels, who can approve it, and what information needs to be captured afterward.
The first principle is purpose. Before approving a meaningful trip, the company should be able to state what the traveler is expected to accomplish and why being there physically improves the odds. That could mean closing a deal, repairing a relationship, learning a skill, visiting a site, recruiting scarce talent, meeting several partners, or building cohesion within a distributed team.
The second is concentration. Once a trip is approved, the traveler should look for sensible ways to add relevant customer meetings, supplier visits, recruiting conversations, training, or networking. That does not mean packing the schedule until it becomes exhausting. It means making the fixed cost of getting someone to another city work harder.
The third is visibility. Amex GBT estimated that SMEs spent more than $800 billion on business travel in 2024 and that about $625 billion was unmanaged, while Euromonitor research found only 35% of global business travel spending was booked by businesses using a travel management company. Better visibility does not require an enterprise system, but it does require knowing what trips cost, why they happened, and what came afterward.
The final principle is restraint. Some trips should disappear because virtual tools are good enough, freeing money for journeys where presence matters more. The future of small-business travel is unlikely to be a simple return to the road or a permanent retreat from it.
It is a more selective model. Small businesses are still traveling because clients, skills, teams, markets, and opportunities remain physical as well as digital, but the burden of proof has shifted. In an era of expensive flights, hybrid work, AI-assisted planning, and employees who expect more flexibility, the business trip that survives will increasingly be the one that can explain exactly why somebody needed to be there.
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