Business Travel Set to Rebound in 2026: Leveraging T&E Takes Center Stage

Summary: Corporate travelers expect to travel more in 2026 than they did in 2025. According to recent surveys by Skift:

• 47% of businesses in the Americas expect to increase travel budgets for 2026 (up 10% from 2025).

• Globally, 45% of businesses will increase their budgets for travel in 2026.

• 90% of business travelers see workforce-related travel as essential to meeting business objectives.

• It’s not all roses: Travel policy compliance continues to be a problem — with increased investment in travel, compliance is a cost/savings linchpin that can’t be overlooked. 

• Efforts to cut costs, while improving T&E processes and visibility around workforce travel should be prioritized. 

 After a sluggish 2025, businesses are projecting increased corporate travel in 2026 with 47% of businesses in the Western Hemisphere and 45% globally planning to increase their travel budgets. Travelers are on board, too. 90% of business travelers say corporate travel is an essential investment or necessary cost, and 84% say that meeting in person is always better than meeting remotely.

Here’s a look at how business travelers are thinking about traveling for work, plus areas where businesses can improve efficiencies and drive strategic savings.

Why Business Travel Matters in 2026

The majority of businesses and business travelers transitioned to remote meetings, conferences, and deal closings following the 2020 pandemic. While the world has opened back up, business travel still hasn’t made it back up to its pre-pandemic rhythm. That’s changing.

Business travelers know that face-to-face communication and connection provide essential foundations for closing deals, team building, developing new business relationships, etc. The top five surveyed reasons employees expect to travel in 2026 are:

1. Essential client-related travel

2. Closing deals

3. Establishing new corporate relationships

4. Team travel to events and conferences

5. Nurture established corporate relationships

How to Get the Most Out of Your Business Travel Program in 2026

With renewed energy and investment around workforce travel set to occur in 2026, opportunities for businesses to drive efficiencies abound.Get the most out of your business travel program in 2026 by addressing travel policy inefficiencies to improve compliance gaps, streamlining T&E processes and spend, and leveraging T&E data to make better decisions.

Improve Travel Policy Inefficiencies and Road Blocks

Travel policy compliance remains poor with 80% of surveyed business travelers admitting to booking travel off-platform. Why? Usually it’s because they’re looking for better prices or more convenient options, although 74% of surveyed travelers say they’d be willing to book cheaper lodging if they received a financial incentive to do so.

This is where a travel policy’s inefficiencies start to show. Only as good as it is followed, a sound travel policy has to take into consideration why and where travelers are disregarding it. Companies should consider adapting their travel policies to offer:

• A booking platform with a range of lodging brands and types 

• A booking platform where hotel loyalty programs stay with the traveler

• A booking platform with easy filtering so each traveler can select lodging based on the amenities that matter most to them

• A commercial trip card or business card for travel expenses so employees don’t have to pay for work-related travel out of pocket

Improving your travel policy can almost always improve compliance.

Streamlining T&E Processes and Spend

For many business travelers, getting reimbursed — or just explaining purchases made on a trip — cuts into valuable time. According to the Skift survey, 71% of travelers have to spend 30 minutes or more filling out an expense report related to corporate travel. For 36%, the time spent is over an hour. 

While it’s essential that spend get allocated properly, this loss of productive employee time to manual processes that could (and honestly should) be automated is a waste. To get the most out of a business travel program, companies need automated processes that cut down on messy manual expense reporting, while also offering visibility into what got spent, when, and why.

Whether the answer is a commercial card that allows for automatic expense category allocation or a booking platform with robust reporting capabilities, it’s time to streamline and automate T&E processes. Not only will doing so cut down on wasted time and errors, it will also help protect traveler morale.

Leverage T&E Data

Another benefit of automating and gaining insight into T&E? Leveraging data. 80% of managers believe they can access the data generated via their T&E programs, but the reality is that only 40% actually have any access to their travel data in real-time. What this means is that the business-related nuances of travel and traveler decisions — e.g. traveler tracking, so you know where your employees are in case of emergency; tracking spend according to cost center or project code; etc. — are essentially lost.

As companies ramp up their spend on business travel for 2026, these details need to be accessible, parsable, and leverageable. Choosing a corporate card program or booking platform that offers insight into travel spend is not a nice-to-have; it’s a differentiator for just how much ROI your business travel program can yield.

Improve your workforce travel program with Corpay Lodging. We’ll help you stay on budget with exclusive, low pre-negotiated rates. Plus, we’ll make it easy for your travelers to stay compliant, so they have no reason to book elsewhere. They’ll get points with their participating hotel loyalty programs, robust amenity filtering, 24/7 member support, and more. Learn more and join for free — no catch, not ever — today.