Best practices for managing the "bleisure" boom and other business travel trends

By Rodrigo Sanchez, Head of Commercial Cards | Published September 2024

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Business travel continues to evolve, adding to the complexities facing mid-size businesses that aim to manage travel strategically and efficiently. New data from Navan, a partner of Citizens that offers holistic travel and expense technology, shows how business travel trends are changing.

From higher prices to “bleisure,” the practice of combining leisure travel with business trips, the current environment reflects the broader shifts happening both in corporate and personal preferences – including a higher volume of travel in general. Navan’s data shows mid-size companies are completing more than eight travel bookings a day on average, compared to about six per day pre-pandemic.

New trends driving business travel

The higher volume of business travel is not the only trend playing out at mid-size companies.

Bleisure, for example, has become increasingly popular. A boom in leisure travel has spread to business booking, as more employees tack some element of personal travel onto their business commitments. According to Navan’s data, bleisure bookings are materially higher even in 2024 than they were in 2023.

Group business trips are also on the rise. As companies and employees seek out a harmonious balance of in-person, hybrid, and remote work, there is more demand for groups of employees to travel together to a destination – whether that’s traveling back to company headquarters for in-person events or traveling to offsite locations as a group. The changing patterns of hybrid and remote work may also be contributing to a shifting mix of business travelers. Salespeople represent the highest percentage of business travelers both pre- and post-pandemic, but among other roles, some are traveling less while some travel more. For instance, HR, operations, and finance professionals are a lower share of business travelers today, while engineers and marketing professionals seem to be traveling more.

Of course, higher costs are another key dynamic for travel today. Flight and accommodation costs have come down from mid-2022 peaks but have settled at a persistently higher level than pre-pandemic. With stable demand from both business and leisure travelers, and higher labor costs for providers, it appears likely that higher cost levels will persist.

Best practices that address new travel trends and legacy problems

Though these travel trends are new, many companies and employees are still stuck with longtime problems arising from a legacy approach to travel.

Old problems linger amid legacy approach to corporate travel management

Old norms include booking travel on a platform that may or may not incorporate travel policies, paying on an employee’s personal credit card and submitting expense reports later, and a cumbersome process of reconciling and reimbursing expenses. Each of these steps is often handled by a separate work stream and over an extended time period.

For companies, this kind of legacy approach creates a number of inefficiencies. If companies only track expenses when reports are submitted by employees, there is an inherent lag between the travel transactions and the time when managers see expense data. Further, they may still have to do considerable administrative work to gather contextual information about the time, place, and nature of each expense. Policies for price, timing, and other attributes may be hard to implement and assess.

For employees, this kind of legacy approach presents the financial burden of carrying travel costs on their personal finances until reimbursement comes through. They also contend with the administrative burden of tracking and submitting expense reports.

As new technology enables an upgraded approach to travel management, companies that adopt current best practices will see that these strategies fit together in a holistic, updated process. We see mid-size company leaders using the following best practices for their corporate travel programs:

1. Replace static with dynamic business travel policies

The old approach usually places static policies on business travel, like static price ceilings for flights or hotels. Dynamic policies, in contrast, use current market conditions to set policy guidelines in each transaction. Travel costs can be quite seasonable and varied. A dynamic policy takes prevailing conditions into account, allowing for higher price limits in busy times and lower price limits in slow times.

With these interactive guardrails in place, employees may actually have more and better choices when it comes to booking travel. Employees may find that they have more options that meet their personal preferences, such as flying at certain times of day or choosing a hotel in their preferred environment.

Companies, in turn, may get much more useful data about the true incidence of out-of-policy transactions, allowing managers to respond and strategize more effectively. They may also be able to optimize their business travel costs as dynamic policy limits change with the pricing environment.

2. Use end-to-end tech to connect policy with the travel booking process

Dynamic policies are only possible when you have the right supporting technology. Companies can see a number of benefits from upgrading to a travel platform that uses their dynamic policies for each transaction.

Navan’s end-to-end travel management technology can also track and summarize expense data in real-time, giving companies greater visibility into their travel expenses and trends.

Employees can benefit where such platforms allow them to add on personal travel to their business commitments and pay separately for just their personal travel – an attractive feature to all those who are participating in the bleisure boom.

3. Use corporate cards to connect policy, capture travel data more usefully, and relieve employee burden

The third component in a best-practice approach is to use corporate cards for travel expenses rather than relying on employees to pay and then recoup the cost.

Corporate cards allow for another layer of policy control. Cards can be linked to specific transaction limits, location specifications, or other parameters to put corporate policy into effect with each booking. Cards also complete the holistic process to generate useful expense data in real time.

Employees often prefer corporate cards because they are relieved of the financial burden of carrying their travel expenses until their reimbursements come through. Corporate cards can also slash the full-time equivalent (FTE) burden related to expense reconciliation both for the employee and for the company.

4. Negotiate discounted rates with preferred travel providers.

Mid-size companies may already be spending on travel at the scale that can give them negotiating power to get discounted rates with their preferred hotel or air travel companies. For those businesses that are not yet at that spending level, there are often “small business program” offerings at national travel providers that could generate discounts. In its partnership with Citizens, Navan also offers a suite of travel consulting services to Citizens clients, where companies can pursue discounted rates on specific reservations like blocks of rooms for specific events.

Using modern tools in corporate travel as you do in other business practices

Relying on legacy processes for business travel, mid-size companies may be missing out on the insights and efficiencies that they capture through data in any other segment of their business – practices that may become even more inefficient in the face of current travel trends. A best-practice approach to travel management uses dynamic policies; end-to-end technology that connects policies, transactions, payment and expense reporting; and corporate card programs that further support policies while relieving employee burdens. Negotiated pricing can also help companies manage rising costs.