There’s a gap between what companies say about the future and what they actually believe about it, and closing that gap is one of the oldest problems in economics. Executives are optimistic on earnings calls because optimism is their job. Surveys of business confidence measure what people are willing to state out loud, which isn’t always what they’d bet on. By the time the hard data arrives, the GDP figures, the employment numbers, the capital spending reports, the moment being measured is already months in the past.

I want to make the case for an indicator that sits closer to the truth than most of these, and that hardly anyone treats as an indicator at all. Corporate travel. The simple record of whether companies are putting their people on planes, and where, and for what. It’s not perfect, no signal is, but it has a quality the others lack. It’s expensive to fake, and it moves early.

Why travel tells the truth

Start with what makes an indicator honest. The best signals are the ones that cost something to send. Talk is cheap, which is why talk is a weak indicator. A survey response costs nothing, so it drifts toward what sounds right. But an action that costs real money to take can’t be faked the same way, because faking it means actually spending the money.

A business trip costs real money. The airfare, the hotel, the day of an expensive person’s time, the whole apparatus of moving a human being across the country or the world to be in a room. When a company decides that’s worth doing, it’s making a costly bet that the meeting, the client, the market will return more than the trip consumed. Nobody spends that kind of money on a future they don’t believe in.

That’s what makes travel different from a confidence survey. A company can tell a pollster it’s optimistic and risk nothing. To actually book the trip, it has to put money behind the belief. And the moment money moves, you’re no longer measuring what a company says about the future. You’re measuring what it’s willing to pay for. That’s a much harder thing to fake, and a much more honest thing to read.

Why it moves early

The second quality of a good leading indicator is timing. It has to move before the thing it predicts, or it’s not leading anything. Travel does, for a structural reason.

Travel is discretionary and fast to adjust. A company can’t unwind a factory or reverse a hiring plan overnight, those decisions are slow and sticky in both directions. But travel can be frozen with a single memo and unfrozen just as fast. That makes it one of the most responsive instruments a company has for expressing a change in outlook. When sentiment shifts, travel is among the first things to move, because it’s among the easiest things to move.

So the sequence tends to run like this. Confidence changes first, in the private judgment of the people who run things. Travel responds almost immediately, because it’s the nearest lever to hand. Hiring and investment follow later, being slower to turn. And the official statistics confirm it last, quarters after the fact, once the moment has fully passed. Travel sits near the front of that chain. By the time the reported numbers catch up, the travel calendar has been telling the story for months.

What it looked like the last time

You didn’t have to theorize about this after the pandemic. You could watch it.

Leisure travel came back first and fastest, running on pure pent-up human desire, which made it a poor read on the economy specifically. Business travel was the more revealing signal, because it came back the way confidence actually returns, unevenly and by sector. Some industries put their people back on planes quickly. Others held back long after their public statements turned upbeat. And the ones flying again were, reliably, the ones that had genuinely decided the world was open for their business, whatever the surveys were saying at the time.

If you’d wanted an early, honest read on which parts of the economy were truly recovering, you could have done worse than to ignore the confident quotes and simply ask a blunter question. Whose people are on planes again, and whose aren’t? The answer tracked the real recovery more faithfully than a lot of the indicators that got more attention.

The reading gets richer up close

The raw question, are companies traveling or not, is only the surface. Look closer and the signal carries more information than a single number could.

Direction matters. A company reopening travel to a specific region is placing a bet on that region, not on travel in general. When several companies in an industry start flying to the same market at once, that’s a cluster of expansion bets forming in real time, visible before any of it shows up as investment or revenue anywhere official.

The kind of trip matters too. A sales team going back on the road means someone expects to sell, which is a bet on demand. Executives flying to evaluate a new market means someone sees an opening there, which is a bet on expansion. Internal travel picking up between offices can mean integration, or restructuring, or a company pulling itself together after a stretch of drift. Each pattern says something specific, and none of it requires waiting for a quarterly report to become visible.

This is the part that gets underused. Travel data isn’t just a yes or no on confidence. It’s a map of where confidence is forming and what shape it’s taking, available in close to real time, if anyone bothers to read it that way.

The limits, honestly

I don’t want to oversell this, because the fastest way to discredit an indicator is to claim too much for it. Travel misleads sometimes, like every signal does.

A single quarter proves nothing. Travel is noisy, it’s affected by things that have nothing to do with confidence, fuel prices spiking, a conference calendar clustering, a one-off event pulling a burst of trips that says nothing about the broader outlook. There are moments when travel drops for reasons that aren’t economic at all, and moments when it holds up out of habit even as the ground shifts underneath. No serious person would read one data point and call the economy.

The value isn’t in any single reading. It’s in the pattern over time, and in using travel alongside the other indicators rather than in place of them. It’s one honest voice in the chorus, worth weighting precisely because it’s harder to fake than most and faster than nearly all. Not a crystal ball. A useful, early, costly-to-fake signal, which in a world full of cheap signals is worth more than it gets credit for.

Why this is worth paying attention to

I’ll admit my own bias here. I spend my days in corporate travel, so of course I think it matters. But I’d argue the case even if I didn’t, because the logic doesn’t depend on me being in the industry. It depends on a simple economic fact. Actions that cost money reveal more than words that don’t, and travel is one of the purest examples of a company spending real money to act on a belief about the future.

That’s what makes the travel calendar worth reading as an economic document, not just an operational one. Buried in the record of who’s flying, and where, and for what, is a running account of what companies actually believe about the months ahead, written in the one language that’s expensive to fake. Most people look at travel data and see logistics. It’s also a confession, if you know how to read it, of confidence that hasn’t yet shown up anywhere else.

About me

I am an entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience at the intersection of tourism and technology. I am co-founder and Chief Business Officer of VOLL, the largest mobile-first corporate travel and expense management platform in Latin America, and a recognized reference in the development of the corporate travel industry.

A Marketing specialist from Fundação Dom Cabral, I serve on the Tourism Council of FecomércioSP and on the Executive Council of the Latin American Association of Corporate Events and Travel Management (Alagev). A frequent traveler and close observer of human behavior in motion, I write and speak about innovation, digital transformation, entrepreneurial leadership, and the future of corporate travel.

For a long time, the travel manager sat quietly in a corner of the org chart that nobody thought about much. The person who managed the travel program, negotiated with airlines and hotels, kept costs in line, and made sure people could get where they needed to go. Useful, unglamorous, and rarely invited to the strategic conversations.

That job is changing underneath the people doing it. And the change is bigger than most companies have registered, because the world got more dangerous and complicated in exactly the ways that turn a booking function into a risk function.

When the world gets volatile, travel gets dangerous

Think about what’s happened to the simple act of sending an employee somewhere.

Geopolitical conflict can close airspace overnight and strand people in the wrong place. A health scare can turn a routine trip into a quarantine. Political instability can make a city that was safe last month risky this month. Extreme weather, now more frequent, can collapse an itinerary and leave travelers exposed. The trip that used to be a logistics problem is now, increasingly, a safety problem.

And when your people are moving through a volatile world, someone has to own the question of their safety. Where are they right now? Are they somewhere that just became dangerous? If something happens, how fast can you find them and get them out? That’s not a booking question. That’s a risk question, and it lands, whether the title has caught up or not, on the person who runs travel.

Duty of care is not optional anymore

There’s a phrase that used to live mostly in legal departments and now sits right in the middle of the travel manager’s job. Duty of care. The obligation a company has to protect the people it sends into the world on its behalf.

It’s not a nice-to-have or a branding line. In many places it’s a legal responsibility, and the expectations around it have risen sharply. If a company sends an employee into a situation that turns dangerous, the questions afterward are pointed. Did you know the risk? Did you have a way to reach them? Did you get them out? Could you account for where every traveler was when it mattered?

Answering those questions is now part of running a travel program. It requires knowing where your travelers are in real time, being able to reach them fast, having a plan for when something breaks. The travel manager has quietly become the person responsible for the company’s answer to duty of care, which is one of the more serious responsibilities in any organization, even if the job description still says “manage the travel program.”

Cost is still there, but it’s no longer the point

Cost hasn’t gone away, to be clear. Budgets are tight, the pressure to spend less is real, and the travel manager still owns all of it. But cost has stopped being the whole job, and in the moments that matter most, it’s not even the priority.

When a crisis hits and travelers are exposed, nobody in leadership is asking whether the program saved twelve percent on airfare last quarter. They’re asking whether the company knows where its people are and can get them home. In that moment, the travel manager isn’t a cost controller. They’re the person standing between the company and a serious failure of responsibility. The job’s center of gravity has moved from saving money to managing exposure, and the second one carries far higher stakes.

Why companies should treat this seriously

Here’s where I think most organizations are behind. They still see travel management as a procurement function, a place to squeeze cost, and they staff it, resource it, and position it accordingly. Meanwhile the actual job has climbed into a category of real strategic risk, and the mismatch is a problem waiting to surface.

The company that recognizes this gives its travel function the standing, the tools, and the seat at the table that a risk role deserves. The one that doesn’t keeps treating a risk officer like a booking clerk, right up until the moment something goes wrong in a dangerous part of the world and it turns out nobody had the authority or the tools to handle it.

The title will catch up eventually. It usually does, after the reality has been true for a while. But the smart move is to see it now, before the crisis forces the recognition. The person running your travel program is quietly holding one of the more serious responsibilities in your company. Worth making sure they have what they need to carry it.

About me

I am an entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience at the intersection of tourism and technology. I am co-founder and Chief Business Officer of VOLL, the largest mobile-first corporate travel and expense management platform in Latin America, and a recognized reference in the development of the corporate travel industry.

A Marketing specialist from Fundação Dom Cabral, I serve on the Tourism Council of FecomércioSP and on the Executive Council of the Latin American Association of Corporate Events and Travel Management (Alagev). A frequent traveler and close observer of human behavior in motion, I write and speak about innovation, digital transformation, entrepreneurial leadership, and the future of corporate travel.

When the pressure comes down and a company needs to spend less, travel is one of the first places it looks. Fair enough. But watch closely and you’ll see two completely different things happening under the same banner, and most companies can’t tell them apart.

One is saving on travel. The other is cutting travel. They sound like cousins. They’re closer to opposites.

Two levers that point in different directions

Saving on travel means the same trips happen, and they cost less. Better fares, smarter timing, negotiated rates, tools that find value the traveler wouldn’t find alone. The person still flies, the meeting still happens, the deal still gets a chance to close. You’ve simply spent less to make the same thing occur. The value is untouched. Only the cost moved.

Cutting travel means the trips stop. The meeting becomes a call, the client doesn’t get the visit, the salesperson stays home. You’ve spent less, yes, but you’ve also removed whatever that trip would have produced. Maybe it would have produced nothing. Maybe it would have produced the relationship that carried the account for three years. The point is that you didn’t save money on that outcome. You traded the outcome away.

Both show up in the budget as a smaller travel number. That’s the trap. On the spreadsheet, a dollar saved through a better fare and a dollar saved by grounding a salesperson look identical. In the business, they could not be more different.

Why the confusion is expensive

Here’s what makes this dangerous. Under pressure, cutting is faster and more visible than saving.

Saving on travel takes capability. You need the tools, the data, the negotiating position, the discipline to find value trip by trip. It’s real work, and it takes time to show up. Cutting travel takes a memo. You freeze the budget, the trips stop, the number drops immediately, and everyone can see you did something decisive. In a quarter where leadership wants to see action, cutting wins on speed every time.

So companies reach for the blunt lever, and they call it savings. But they haven’t saved anything. They’ve deferred cost into a form that doesn’t show up on the travel line, the deal that didn’t close, the client who drifted, the market they stopped showing up in. That cost is real. It just lands later, somewhere else, where nobody connects it back to the travel freeze that caused it.

And by the time it lands, the person who froze the budget has been rewarded for the visible savings and moved on. The bill arrives with no name on it.

The trip is not the cost. The trip is the investment.

Underneath all of this is a category error. Companies treat travel as a cost to be minimized, when a business trip is closer to an investment expected to return more than it costs.

You don’t minimize investments. You optimize them. You put money into the ones that pay off and pull it from the ones that don’t, and you get better over time at telling which is which. A company that treats every trip as pure cost has no way to make that distinction. All it can do is spend less across the board, starving the trips that would have paid off alongside the ones that wouldn’t.

That’s the deep problem with cutting dressed up as saving. It’s indiscriminate. It can’t tell the difference between the trip that mattered and the trip that didn’t, so it cuts both equally, and calls the whole thing prudent.

What good actually looks like

The companies that handle this well do something harder than cutting and smarter than spending freely. They separate the two levers on purpose.

They push relentlessly on saving, on paying less for the trips that should happen, because that’s free value with no downside. And they get selective about the trips themselves based on what those trips are worth, not based on a blanket freeze. They protect the travel that drives the business and question the travel that’s become a habit, which is a judgment about value, not a percentage cut applied to everyone.

That’s the real discipline. Not spending less on travel. Spending less on the travel that doesn’t matter, and staying willing to spend on the travel that does. A company that can hold that distinction under pressure will beat one that just freezes the budget and calls it a win, every time the bill finally comes due.

About me

I am an entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience at the intersection of tourism and technology. I am co-founder and Chief Business Officer of VOLL, the largest mobile-first corporate travel and expense management platform in Latin America, and a recognized reference in the development of the corporate travel industry.

A Marketing specialist from Fundação Dom Cabral, I serve on the Tourism Council of FecomércioSP and on the Executive Council of the Latin American Association of Corporate Events and Travel Management (Alagev). A frequent traveler and close observer of human behavior in motion, I write and speak about innovation, digital transformation, entrepreneurial leadership, and the future of corporate travel.

Airline loyalty programs are one of the strangest and most lucrative inventions in modern business. Some airlines are worth more for their miles programs than for the actual business of flying planes. And the whole edifice rests on a single assumption that we’re about to knock out from under it.

The assumption is that a human being is choosing the flight.

Miles, status tiers, points, the psychology of the free upgrade, all of it exists to nudge a person. To make you, the traveler, pick this airline over that one, pay a little more, stay a little more loyal, because there’s a reward tied to your name. The entire system is a machine for influencing human choice. So what happens when the human stops choosing, and an AI agent books the trip instead?

Loyalty is a system built for human psychology

Step back and look at what loyalty programs actually manipulate. They run on things that only work on people.

The sunk-cost feeling of not wanting to waste the miles you’ve banked. The small status thrill of boarding first, of the tier that says you matter. The vague sense that this airline is yours, that you’ve built something with them worth protecting. None of these are rational, exactly, and that’s the point. They work because humans aren’t rational about rewards. We overvalue the points, we chase the status, we stay loyal past the moment loyalty pays.

An algorithm feels none of it. Hand the booking to an AI agent whose job is to find the best flight for the trip and the policy, and every one of those levers goes dead. The agent doesn’t get a thrill from status. It doesn’t feel the pull of banked miles. It doesn’t think of any airline as its airline. It just optimizes, coldly, for what the trip actually needs.

The corporate wrinkle makes it sharper

This is already complicated in corporate travel, in a way that makes the coming shift even more interesting.

In business travel, the person earning the miles and the company paying for the flight are usually not the same. The traveler collects the points, keeps the status, enjoys the perks. The company eats the cost. Which means the loyalty program has, for years, been quietly influencing corporate booking decisions in a direction that serves the traveler’s personal balance more than the company’s budget. Everyone in the industry knows this and mostly doesn’t say it.

An AI agent booking on the company’s behalf has no personal miles balance to feed. It’s loyal to the company that deployed it, not to any airline. So the moment agents start booking corporate travel at scale, a quiet distortion that’s been baked into the system for decades simply switches off. The flight gets chosen for the trip, not for the traveler’s status ambitions. That’s a real change, and the airlines know exactly what it threatens.

What the airlines will do about it

They won’t sit still, obviously. A hundred billion dollars in program value doesn’t evaporate without a fight, and the response is worth watching.

One path is to make loyalty legible to machines. If humans stop being the ones to persuade, then the rewards have to speak to whatever is doing the choosing, which means restructuring benefits so an optimizing agent can factor them in as real economic value rather than emotional pull. That’s a profound redesign, turning a psychological system into a mathematical one.

Another path is to compete for the agents themselves, to make sure that when an AI evaluates options, the airline’s true costs and benefits are visible and attractive on the merits, stripped of the emotional scaffolding that no longer works. And a third, quieter possibility is that a chunk of loyalty’s value was always a kind of soft inefficiency, travelers making slightly worse economic choices because the points felt good, and that some of that value simply goes away when the choosing gets rational. Not all of it survives the transition.

The deeper shift

What I keep coming back to is that this isn’t really a story about miles. It’s an early, concrete example of something much larger.

We’ve built entire industries on top of the quirks of human decision-making. On the fact that people are impatient, loyal, status-seeking, a little irrational about rewards. Loyalty programs are just an unusually pure case, a business that exists almost entirely to exploit predictable human psychology. When the deciding moves from humans to agents, every business built on those quirks has to ask what it’s actually worth once the quirks stop applying.

Airlines are going to face that question early, because their exposure is so clean and so large. They won’t be the last. Anywhere a business depends on a human making a slightly irrational choice, an optimizing agent is coming to make the rational one instead. Miles are simply where we’ll get to watch it happen first.

About me

I am an entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience at the intersection of tourism and technology. I am co-founder and Chief Business Officer of VOLL, the largest mobile-first corporate travel and expense management platform in Latin America, and a recognized reference in the development of the corporate travel industry.

A Marketing specialist from Fundação Dom Cabral, I serve on the Tourism Council of FecomércioSP and on the Executive Council of the Latin American Association of Corporate Events and Travel Management (Alagev). A frequent traveler and close observer of human behavior in motion, I write and speak about innovation, digital transformation, entrepreneurial leadership, and the future of corporate travel.

Somewhere in most travel policies lives a ghost. The average business traveler. The person the policy was written for, the one who books a reasonable flight, stays in a reasonable hotel, spends a reasonable amount, and behaves in the reasonable, predictable way the rules assume.

I’ve spent years around corporate travel, and I’ve never met this person. Nobody has. Because the average traveler is a statistical artifact, a number you get by blending wildly different people into one imaginary figure who represents none of them.

The average hides everyone real

Think about who actually travels for a company.

There’s the executive whose time is the most expensive thing in the equation, for whom a cheaper flight with a long layover is a terrible trade. There’s the salesperson living on the road, who knows the airports better than the gate agents and needs speed and flexibility above all. There’s the technician flying out to fix something urgent, whose trip is unplanned by nature and can’t wait for an advance-purchase fare. There’s the junior employee on their first business trip, who doesn’t know how any of this works and needs the program to guide them.

A single policy, built around the average, serves all of them and fits none of them. It’s too rigid for the executive, too slow for the salesperson, too planning-dependent for the technician, too confusing for the newcomer. The average is a compromise that quietly fails everyone at once.

Why we built it this way

The average traveler wasn’t a mistake. It was a necessity, back when it was the best we could do.

For most of the history of managed travel, you couldn’t personalize at scale. You had one policy, maybe a couple of tiers if you were sophisticated, and you applied it to everyone because applying anything more granular was impossible to administer. The average wasn’t chosen because it was good. It was chosen because the alternative, treating thousands of travelers as thousands of distinct cases, couldn’t be done by hand.

So the fiction was practical. It let a company have a policy at all. The cost of the fiction, the fact that it fit no one well, was just accepted as the price of having any system at all.

The constraint is gone, the habit isn’t

Here’s what’s changed. The reason the average existed, that you couldn’t handle the complexity of real individuals, isn’t true anymore.

The data now exists to know that this executive always takes the early flight, that this salesperson rebooks constantly and values a flexible fare over a cheap one, that this team travels together to the same client every month. The technology exists to act on all of it, to shape the experience around who someone actually is instead of who the average pretends they are. The constraint that forced the fiction has quietly dissolved.

What’s left is the habit. Companies keep writing one policy for the imaginary average traveler because that’s how it’s always been done, not because they still have to. The tools moved on. The thinking mostly didn’t.

What personalization actually means here

I want to be careful, because “personalization” is a word that’s been worn smooth by overuse. I don’t mean letting everyone do whatever they want, which is just the absence of a program. I mean the opposite of the blunt average.

It means a program that knows the difference between the traveler whose time is worth protecting and the one for whom cost is genuinely the priority, and treats them differently on purpose. It means rules that bend for the trip that couldn’t be planned and hold firm for the one that could. It means guidance that shows up for the person who’s never done this and gets out of the way of the person who’s done it a thousand times.

The average traveler was a reasonable answer to a real limitation. That limitation is gone. Every program still built around that ghost is leaving something on the table, in cost, in experience, in the simple respect of treating people like the specific travelers they are rather than the blurry average they never were.

About me

I am an entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience at the intersection of tourism and technology. I am co-founder and Chief Business Officer of VOLL, the largest mobile-first corporate travel and expense management platform in Latin America, and a recognized reference in the development of the corporate travel industry.

A Marketing specialist from Fundação Dom Cabral, I serve on the Tourism Council of FecomércioSP and on the Executive Council of the Latin American Association of Corporate Events and Travel Management (Alagev). A frequent traveler and close observer of human behavior in motion, I write and speak about innovation, digital transformation, entrepreneurial leadership, and the future of corporate travel.

I run a company that exists because people travel for work. So what I’m about to say cuts against my own interest, which is maybe why it took me a while to say it out loud.

The best thing a travel program can do, sometimes, is prevent a trip.

Not optimize it. Not find a cheaper fare or a better route. Prevent it. Look at a trip that’s about to be booked and conclude, quietly, that it doesn’t need to exist. That the meeting could be a call, that the site visit could wait, that three people are flying to a thing that needs one. And almost nobody in this industry is set up to do that, because almost nobody gets rewarded for it.

Everyone is paid for the trip to happen

Follow the incentives and it’s obvious. The airline wants the seat filled. The hotel wants the room booked. The agency, traditionally, earns more when more trips move through it. Even inside the company, the person booking usually isn’t the person paying, and the person paying rarely sees the booking until it’s already done.

Every arrow points toward the trip happening. Nobody in the chain has a reason to stand up and ask whether it should. The entire machine is tuned to reduce friction, to make yes easier, and a question like “does this need to happen?” is friction by definition.

So the question doesn’t get asked. Not because anyone’s acting in bad faith, but because no one owns it. It falls in the gap between everybody’s job.

The trip that shouldn’t have happened

You know the ones I mean. Four people flying to a two-hour meeting that ended in a decision an email could have carried. The quarterly visit that happens because it happened last quarter, not because anyone still needs it. The conference someone attends out of habit, comes home from, and can’t quite say what changed.

These trips have a real cost, and it isn’t only the airfare. It’s the day lost to airports. The person who’s tired instead of sharp for the thing that actually mattered that week. The carbon, if the company claims to care about that. And the slow erosion that happens when travel becomes a reflex instead of a decision, when people stop asking why and just book.

None of that shows up in a savings report. A travel program measured on cost-per-trip has no way to see the trip that shouldn’t have been a trip. It can only make the unnecessary trip cheaper.

Why this is hard to sell

I’m aware of the tension in what I’m arguing. A company that travels less is, in the short run, a smaller customer for people like me. I get it. But I think the framing is wrong, and here’s why.

A traveler who trusts that their program only sends them where it matters is a traveler who values that program completely differently. The goal was never volume for its own sake. It was the right trips, the ones that move something, taken by people who aren’t worn down by a dozen pointless ones. A program that helps a company travel with intention is worth more to that company, not less, even if the raw number of trips goes down.

The problem is that intention is hard to put in a contract. Cost-per-trip is easy to measure. “Did this trip need to happen?” is a judgment, and judgment doesn’t fit neatly in a dashboard. So the industry keeps optimizing the thing it can count and leaves the more valuable thing untouched.

What intention would actually look like

I don’t think the answer is some tool that blocks trips, or an approval layer that makes everyone’s life harder. That just adds friction of a different kind.

I think it’s a shift in what a program is for. Imagine the data actually being used to ask better questions. This route gets flown constantly by this team, always for the same kind of meeting. Is that still worth it, or has it become a habit nobody’s revisited? These three people always travel together to the same client. Do they all need to go?

Not to forbid anything. To surface the question that currently no one is positioned to raise, and put it in front of someone who can actually weigh it. The trip you take on purpose is worth more than the one you take on autopilot. A program that knew the difference, and helped its company see it, would be doing the most valuable thing in travel that nobody is currently paid to do.

About me

I am an entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience at the intersection of tourism and technology. I am co-founder and Chief Business Officer of VOLL, the largest mobile-first corporate travel and expense management platform in Latin America, and a recognized reference in the development of the corporate travel industry.

A Marketing specialist from Fundação Dom Cabral, I serve on the Tourism Council of FecomércioSP and on the Executive Council of the Latin American Association of Corporate Events and Travel Management (Alagev). A frequent traveler and close observer of human behavior in motion, I write and speak about innovation, digital transformation, entrepreneurial leadership, and the future of corporate travel.

I’ve been on the receiving end of a lot of travel RFPs. The request for proposal, the formal document a company sends out when it wants to pick a travel provider. And I’ve come to believe the process itself is quietly broken, in a way that hurts the very companies running it.

Here’s what usually happens. A company decides to shop for a new travel partner. Procurement builds a spreadsheet with a few hundred questions, most of them inherited from the last time they ran the process, which was inherited from the time before that. Vendors fill in the boxes. The scores get tallied. And the contract tends to go to whoever answered the most boxes with a yes, not to whoever would actually run the best program.

The problem isn’t that RFPs exist. Some structure is better than none. The problem is what they measure.

Counting features instead of outcomes

Most travel RFPs are feature checklists. Does your tool do this? Can it integrate with that? Do you support this obscure edge case someone hit once in 2019 and wrote into the template forever?

A vendor who checks every box looks strong on paper. But a yes in a spreadsheet tells you almost nothing about whether the thing works well, whether travelers will actually use it, or whether support picks up the phone at two in the morning when a trip falls apart. The RFP rewards breadth of features. It says very little about depth of execution. And execution is the entire game.

I’ve watched companies choose the vendor with the longest feature list and end up with a program nobody wanted to use. The boxes were all ticked. The travelers still booked around the tool, because it was painful, because support was slow, because the thing that looked complete on paper was miserable in practice.

The questions that never make the list

What’s striking is what these documents leave out.

They rarely ask what happens when something goes wrong, which is the moment that actually defines a travel program. A flight gets cancelled at midnight, a hotel walks a guest, someone’s stranded in a city where they don’t speak the language. That’s when you find out what a provider is made of. Almost no RFP probes it seriously.

They rarely ask about the traveler’s experience, even though traveler adoption is what determines whether any of the promised savings ever materialize. A program the traveler avoids is a program that saves nothing, no matter how the contract reads.

And they rarely ask the provider to prove anything. A vendor can claim a capability, tick the box, and never be asked to show it live. The demo, when there is one, is scripted. The hard question, the one that would expose the gap between the claim and the reality, tends not to get asked.

Why the process resists change

If the process is this flawed, why does it survive? A few reasons, and none of them are anybody’s fault exactly.

Procurement teams are measured on running a defensible process, not on the outcome two years later. A spreadsheet with scores is defensible. It produces a clear winner, an audit trail, a number to point at. Judgment is harder to defend, even when judgment would pick the better partner.

The templates get copied forward because rebuilding one from scratch is real work, and the person inheriting it usually assumes the questions are there for a reason. So the 2019 edge case lives on, and the questions that would actually matter never get added, because nobody has the time or the mandate to rethink the whole thing.

And vendors, honestly, have learned to play the game. We know how to answer the boxes. The whole industry has optimized around producing yeses, which means the document measures how good a vendor is at filling out documents, a skill with almost no relationship to running a good program.

A better way to choose

If I were buying travel today, I’d throw out most of the checklist and ask a smaller number of harder questions.

I’d ask the provider to walk me through the last three times a trip went badly for one of their clients, in detail, including what broke and how they handled it. I’d want to talk to a traveler who uses the tool every week, not the executive who signed the contract. I’d ask to see the thing work live, with an unscripted scenario I brought myself. And I’d weigh how the provider handles the messy, unglamorous middle of a program far more heavily than how many features they can list.

The goal of an RFP shouldn’t be to find the vendor who says yes the most. It should be to find the one who will still be answering the phone when everything else has gone wrong. Those are rarely the same vendor, and the current process is very good at telling them apart in exactly the wrong direction.

About me

I am an entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience at the intersection of tourism and technology. I am co-founder and Chief Business Officer of VOLL, the largest mobile-first corporate travel and expense management platform in Latin America, and a recognized reference in the development of the corporate travel industry.

A Marketing specialist from Fundação Dom Cabral, I serve on the Tourism Council of FecomércioSP and on the Executive Council of the Latin American Association of Corporate Events and Travel Management (Alagev). A frequent traveler and close observer of human behavior in motion, I write and speak about innovation, digital transformation, entrepreneurial leadership, and the future of corporate travel.

The first budget line a nervous company freezes is almost always travel. It’s discretionary, it’s visible, and cutting it feels responsible. A CFO who senses trouble coming will ground the trips long before touching headcount, and long before anyone goes near the core of the operation.

Which is exactly why travel is worth watching. Not because it’s big, though it is. Because it moves early. Whether to send someone on a plane, or keep them at their desk, is one of the most sensitive instruments a company has for showing how it really feels about the months ahead. It reacts before hiring does, before capital spending does, before most of the figures economists actually track.

The trip is a confidence signal

Think about what a business trip actually is. Nobody flies three hours to close a deal they don’t believe in. Travel spend is a bet on the future. You pay now because you expect the meeting, the client, the partnership to be worth more than the fare later on.

So a travel freeze isn’t only cost-cutting. It’s a company saying, in the most concrete way it has, that it’s no longer sure the future justifies the ticket. When travel comes back, that doubt has lifted. Someone decided the meeting was worth flying for again.

And that decision usually lands before the recovery shows up in any official number. The confidence comes back, the spending trails it, and the reported data confirms it a couple of quarters later, once the moment has already passed.

What the last few years showed

You could watch this happen after the pandemic. Leisure came roaring back first, running on pure pent-up desire. Business travel was the more revealing one. It returned uuneven, one sector at a time, and where it returned, it tended to mark which industries had actually found their footing again, whatever their press releases claimed.

The companies putting people back on planes had decided the world was open. The ones keeping their teams home weren’t convinced yet, no matter what they said out loud. You wanted to know how an industry was really doing? Easier to check whether its people were flying than to parse another confident quote.

Why this matters more now

We’re in a stretch where confidence is thin and looks completely different depending on where you’re standing. Geopolitical shocks, fuel swinging around, currencies lurching. In a mess like this, the official indicators lag worse than usual, because all they can do is describe what already happened. Travel captures what companies are willing to commit to today.

That’s the useful part. A firm can tell you it’s optimistic on an earnings call for free. It’s a lot harder to fake when you look at whether it’s actually spending to get people in front of clients. Anyone can say the words. Buying the ticket costs something.

What I’d watch

If I wanted an early read on where things are going, I wouldn’t open with the headline figures. I’d look at which companies are reopening their travel budgets, and for what. A sales team back on the road usually means somebody expects to sell. An executive flying into a market nobody’s touched in a while usually means somebody sees something there.

It’s not a crystal ball. Travel can mislead like any signal, and one quarter proves nothing on its own. But the pattern holds up more often than it fails. Who’s flying, and where, is one of the more honest things a company lets slip about its own confidence. And confidence tends to move first. The rest of the economy spends the next few quarters catching up to a call somebody already made.

About me

I am an entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience at the intersection of tourism and technology. I am co-founder and Chief Business Officer of VOLL, the largest mobile-first corporate travel and expense management platform in Latin America, and a recognized reference in the development of the corporate travel industry.

A Marketing specialist from Fundação Dom Cabral, I serve on the Tourism Council of FecomércioSP and on the Executive Council of the Latin American Association of Corporate Events and Travel Management (Alagev). A frequent traveler and close observer of human behavior in motion, I write and speak about innovation, digital transformation, entrepreneurial leadership, and the future of corporate travel.

A few weeks ago I sat in a room with two directors of a large business group. One ran facilities, the other HR. The company was twenty-five years old, held more than twenty operating companies, and spent north of eighteen million dollars a year moving its people around. Serious operation, serious people.

At some point I asked them something simple. Why weren’t their travel payments running on the corporate payment tools their own bank already offered?

They looked at me like I’d switched languages. They had no idea those tools existed. So I walked them through it: what corporate travel payment products are, how they work, what they cost, which is usually nothing, and what they’d do to the mountain of admin their teams were hauling around every month. Before we’d even finished, one of them was on the phone with his account manager at the bank, asking for virtual cards to centralize the payment of flights and hotels.

Eighteen million dollars a year, and the fix had been sitting at their own bank the whole time.

A solved problem nobody told the buyers about

I’ve started to think this is the real payments story in corporate travel, and it isn’t the one the industry likes to tell. We talk about payment as if it were some frontier we’re all racing toward. It’s stranger than that. The technology already exists, it’s mature, it’s been proven for years, and a lot of the market, including big, sophisticated companies, just doesn’t know it’s there.

Let me be concrete, because the value isn’t abstract.

What these tools kill is reconciliation. The usual setup goes like this: a supplier charges someone’s card, a receipt turns up somewhere, an expense report gets filed weeks later, and finance spends the end of every month piecing together what happened by hand. The traveler floats the company’s cash while all that plays out. Every step leaks time and data.

The tools collapse it. You get one monthly invoice instead of a scatter of charges, flights and hotels paid centrally, and reconciliation that just happens, because a virtual card is tied to a single booking. What got approved is what gets charged, with the merchant and amount and category already stitched on.

And none of it is experimental. Banks have sold this for years.

So why doesn’t anyone use it

Here’s the part I keep chewing on. If it’s free, and it works, and it’s already at the company’s bank, how does an eighteen-million-dollar program go years without touching it?

Three things pile up, I think.

One, the banks and providers are quiet about these products. Almost no presence in the rooms where travel and finance people actually swap notes. Little noise, little sales energy pointed at the people who’d gain the most.

Two, the product itself froze in time. These cards work more or less the way they did in the early 2000s, and when something stops evolving, there’s nothing fresh to say about it, nothing to make a buyer look twice.

Three, and this is the delicate one, travel managers get squeezed harder every year to prove efficiency, but the money side of their own programs usually isn’t where their strength lies. You can’t hunt for something you don’t know is there. No shame in that. It’s true of anyone standing in front of a tool nobody bothered to show them.

Stack those three up and you get a product that fits the market almost perfectly and still goes largely unused. And it isn’t only the buyers who lose. Suppliers and agencies lose too, because cleaner payment is better for everybody in the chain.

The reaction tells you everything

When I walk a company through this, I almost always get the same reaction I got in that room. Surprise. It’s a little like telling someone the happy ending of a Greek tragedy. They’re floored, mostly because they didn’t know the thing existed, what it does, how you sign up, or that it tends to cost nothing.

There’s an opening in that surprise, for whoever’s willing to be the one explaining it. The company walks out having learned something and having solved a real headache. That’s value you get to hand over before you ever try to sell anything.

Where this actually goes

Pull back, and the payment problem isn’t really about technology. The technology is finished. What’s missing is that people don’t know it’s finished. Buyers don’t know these tools exist, and the people who make them haven’t done much to fix that.

If you run a travel program, the move is almost too simple. Ask your bank which corporate travel payment tools you already have sitting on the shelf. Good chance the answer surprises you, and a good chance it’s free to start. One invoice, automatic reconciliation, flights and hotels paid centrally. Now, not someday.

For those of us who build in this business, the work in front of us has nothing to do with inventing anything. It’s closing the gap between a solution that already works and the people who’d be better off with it. We got very good at helping companies pick a trip. We’ve barely started helping them figure out how to pay for it.

About me

I am an entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience at the intersection of tourism and technology. I am co-founder and Chief Business Officer of VOLL, the largest mobile-first corporate travel and expense management platform in Latin America, and a recognized reference in the development of the corporate travel industry.

A Marketing specialist from Fundação Dom Cabral, I serve on the Tourism Council of FecomércioSP and on the Executive Council of the Latin American Association of Corporate Events and Travel Management (Alagev). A frequent traveler and close observer of human behavior in motion, I write and speak about innovation, digital transformation, entrepreneurial leadership, and the future of corporate travel.

I want to write directly to a group of people I have spent my whole career around, and who I think are getting a raw deal in the current conversation about artificial intelligence. Corporate travel managers. Travel coordinators. The people who, in companies all over the world, quietly make sure that colleagues get where they need to be, safely, within budget, and back home again. If you are one of them, you have probably spent the last two years hearing some version of the same message: the AI is coming, the booking is automating, the role is shrinking. I think that message is wrong, and I think it is wrong in a way that matters, because believing it leads good people to undervalue themselves at exactly the moment their value is about to climb.

Let me make the case, and let me make it with evidence rather than reassurance, because reassurance without evidence is just a pat on the head.

What is actually being automated

Start with what is true, because the fear is not baseless. A real part of the traditional travel-management job is being absorbed by software, and there is no honest way to pretend otherwise. The transactional core of the role, the manual searching, the rebooking, the rate audits, the policy exceptions processed one at a time, is exactly the kind of repetitive, rules-based work that modern tools do well. The industry is direct about this: modern platforms now automate fare rebooking, hotel rate audits, and policy exceptions, freeing the manager for strategic work. Routine booking tasks are under automation pressure, and anyone telling travel managers otherwise is not doing them a favor.

But notice the precise shape of what is being automated. It is the part of the job that was never the point. No travel manager got into this work because they loved manually re-shopping a fare at eleven at night, or auditing hotel rates in a spreadsheet, or processing the same policy exception for the hundredth time. That was the toll the job extracted, not the value the job created. And here is the thing the doom narrative misses entirely: when you automate the toll, you do not erase the worker. You free them for the part that was always the real work.

The role was already changing, and fast

This is not a prediction. It is already happening, and the people tracking the profession can measure it. The travel-manager job description has shifted faster in the last 24 months than in the prior decade, moving from booking coordination toward procurement strategy and operational risk management. The work that holds value is the part that protects the business: disruption handling, policy and spend visibility, and traveler safety when the stakes are high. The role is shifting toward strategy precisely because the basic booking is getting faster.

Look at what is rising in value as the transactional work falls away. Duty of care has become a board-level concern: by the 2025 GBTA Risk Report, 84% of large enterprises now require pre-trip risk approval for travel to elevated-risk destinations, up from 61% in 2022. Sustainability reporting is moving from voluntary to mandatory, which I have written about before, and it lands squarely on the travel manager’s desk. Supplier negotiation, stakeholder management across HR, finance, and legal, calm judgment during a medical evacuation or a ground-stop event: none of this is automatable, and all of it is becoming more central to the role, not less.

The market backdrop makes this even clearer. Business travel is not shrinking; it is projected to grow at double digits annually through the early 2030s. A growing, more complex, more regulated travel market does not need fewer skilled people managing it. It needs more capable ones, equipped differently than before.

What the tools actually do to a good manager

I find the most convincing evidence in the specific, concrete stories of travel managers who have already crossed into the new version of the job, because they show what the transition actually looks like from the inside, rather than in the abstract.

There is a head of travel at a well-known software company who described what modern tooling did for him, and his phrasing has stuck with me. He said the software does not do his job, but it gives him the ability to do his job exceptionally well. He can now generate an urgent report for senior leadership in under a minute, which turns him into a responsive business partner who delivers instant insight when leadership is making a critical decision. Read that carefully, because it is the whole argument in miniature. The technology did not replace him. It promoted him. It took him from the person who would have spent two days assembling that report to the person in the room when the decision gets made.

Another travel leader, at a fast-growing food company, put the shift this way: before, she understood travel patterns anecdotally, but now she has comprehensive data insights that let her optimize the program strategically. That is the move from firefighting to future planning, from reacting to anticipating, and it is the move the best people in this field are making right now. The technology is not the threat. It is the thing that finally lets a skilled travel manager operate at the level their judgment always deserved.

This is why I tell people in this profession to view modern platforms not as a threat to the role but as professional development tools that amplify their expertise. The travel managers who are thriving are the ones who treat the time freed by automation as an opening to develop the strategic muscles that automation cannot touch.

The skills that compound

If the transactional work is leaving and the strategic work is rising, the practical question for anyone in this career is simple: what should I get good at? The evidence points clearly at a handful of capabilities, and the encouraging part is that none of them require becoming a technologist.

The first is data literacy. Not data science, data literacy: the ability to read a dashboard, interpret a trend, and present numbers clearly to a finance team. The modern travel manager is increasingly expected to be comfortable reading the data and turning it into a recommendation. This is the single highest-leverage skill in the new version of the job, because it is what converts the output of the tools into decisions the business acts on.

The second is the cluster of genuinely human skills that become more valuable, not less, as the routine work automates. Stakeholder management across departments. Clear executive communication. Negotiation with suppliers. Calm under crisis. These are the skills the role is described as demanding now, and they are precisely the skills no model possesses. A machine can audit a fare. It cannot sit across a table from a supplier and read the room, or hold a leadership team steady during a crisis, or persuade a reluctant department to adopt a new policy.

The third is what I would call strategic fluency: understanding the company’s actual goals, its budget cycles, its priorities, well enough to speak the language of business strategy rather than the language of travel logistics. When a travel manager can do that, they stop being a service provider and become an advisor. That is the promotion that is available, right now, to anyone in this field willing to reach for it.

The transformations pushing all of this

None of this is happening in a vacuum, and it is worth naming the larger forces, because they explain why this shift is structural rather than a passing phase. The role is being reshaped simultaneously by globalization, by technological advancement, by changing employee expectations, and by the rise of ESG reporting. Each of these adds complexity, and complexity is the travel manager’s job security, because complexity is exactly what cannot be reduced to an automated booking.

Consider how these pile onto the desk. Travelers now expect a consumer-grade experience and the blending of work and personal travel. Regulators now demand emissions disclosure that requires connected, auditable data. Geopolitical volatility makes duty of care a constant rather than an occasional concern. A business trip in 2026 sits at the intersection of finance, sustainability, security, technology, and human wellbeing, and someone has to stand at that intersection and make sense of it. That someone is the travel manager. The job is not disappearing. It is becoming the coordination point for some of the most strategically important questions a company faces.

What I would say to someone in the job

I come at this, admittedly, from a particular place. I run a company that builds the very technology people fear will replace these roles. So you might reasonably expect me to soften the automation story. I am doing the opposite, and I mean it, because I have watched this play out and the evidence is on the side of the optimists, not the doomsayers.

The technology I help build is not designed to remove the travel manager. It is designed to remove the toll, the manual, repetitive, attention-draining work that kept skilled people stuck doing tasks beneath their judgment. What is left when that toll is gone is not a smaller job. It is a bigger one: the strategy, the negotiation, the risk judgment, the human leadership that the role was always secretly about and rarely had time for. The best travel programs I have seen are not the ones with the fewest people. They are the ones where capable professionals were freed by good tools to operate at the top of their ability.

So if you are in this profession and you have been told your role is shrinking, I would gently push back. The transactional part is shrinking. The strategic part is expanding faster. The question is not whether AI will take your job. It is whether you will use the time AI gives back to step into the larger version of it that is opening up. The people who do that are about to become some of the most valuable players in their companies, sitting at the intersection of cost, risk, sustainability, and human experience, with the data and tools to actually steer it.

The job everyone keeps saying AI will erase is, in fact, about to become one of the most strategic seats in the building. The only thing that will erase a travel manager is deciding to stay in the part of the job the machines are taking, instead of stepping into the part only a person can do. That part is bigger than it has ever been. I would tell anyone in this field to go claim it.

About me

I am an entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience at the intersection of tourism and technology. I am co-founder and Chief Business Officer of VOLL, the largest mobile-first corporate travel and expense management platform in Latin America, and a recognized reference in the development of the corporate travel industry.

A Marketing specialist from Fundação Dom Cabral, I serve on the Tourism Council of FecomércioSP and on the Executive Council of the Latin American Association of Corporate Events and Travel Management (Alagev). A frequent traveler and close observer of human behavior in motion, I write and speak about innovation, digital transformation, entrepreneurial leadership, and the future of corporate travel.

When I started writing this newsletter, I opened with a piece about how Brazil has one of the largest airport networks in the world and flies far less than it should. I have been thinking, lately, about why that gap exists, and I have come to believe it points at something much larger than Brazil, something that is about to reshape the entire economics of travel. The short version is this: for most of the history of this industry, the winners were the ones with the biggest network. I do not think that will be true for much longer.

Let me make the case for the old logic first, because it was correct for a long time, and understanding why it was correct is the key to seeing why it is ending.

Why scale was the moat

For roughly a century, travel was a scale business in the most literal sense. Value came from the size and reach of your physical and contractual network. An airline with more routes, more slots, more aircraft, and more interline agreements could serve more journeys than a smaller one, and that breadth compounded. A travel agency with more locations, more agents, and more supplier relationships could handle more clients across more destinations. A hotel chain with more properties in more cities had more to sell to any given corporate account. The moat was the network, and the network was physical: gates, planes, offices, contracts, bodies. Bigger genuinely meant better, because the constraint on serving a customer was the reach of your infrastructure, and infrastructure scaled with size.

This logic built the industry we have. It explains the megamergers, the global alliances, the consolidation of agencies into ever-larger TMCs. Everyone was racing to assemble the biggest network, because the biggest network won. And in the world that logic was built for, they were right to race.

But that world rested on an assumption that is quietly dissolving, and once you see the assumption, you see why the whole logic is about to invert.

The assumption that is dissolving

The assumption was that the hard part of travel was access: physically reaching the inventory, the route, the room, the seat. When access is the constraint, scale is the answer, because scale is how you maximize access. The biggest network reaches the most things.

Access is no longer the constraint. This is the shift that changes everything, and it has been creeping up for two decades. Through global distribution systems, through APIs, through the new direct-connect protocols the airlines themselves are pushing, the inventory of the world is increasingly reachable by anyone with the right connections into it. The seat that once required a particular agency’s particular relationship is now, more and more, visible and bookable through many channels at once. The room, the fare, the route: the raw access to them is commoditizing. And when access commoditizes, the value built on top of access erodes with it.

So if access is no longer scarce, what is? This is the question that decides the next decade, and the answer is the inverse of the old one.

What is scarce now

What is scarce now is not reach but intelligence: the ability to look at the vast, commoditized, overwhelming sea of available options and find the right one. Not the cheapest in a naive sense, not the first one a search returns, but the right one, the combination that is most economical and most compliant and best for the specific traveler and the specific trip, surfaced instantly, from a field of possibilities too large for any human to search.

This is a different kind of advantage, and it does not come from size. It comes from how well you can see and reason over the options that everyone can now reach. The moat is no longer the network. The moat is the intelligence applied to the network. And intelligence does not scale the way physical networks scaled. A bigger agency is not automatically a smarter one. In fact, the largest incumbents often carry the heaviest legacy, the most fragmented systems, the most accumulated complexity, which makes them slower to apply intelligence, not faster. Size, which was the great advantage of the old era, can become a liability in the new one.

I want to connect this to the threads I have been pulling on across everything I have written here, because this is where they converge.

Where the threads converge

I have argued that the largest hidden cost in travel is time, not fares. That the traveler does not want a better app, but to not think about the trip at all. That an AI agent is only as good as the data underneath it. That sustainability is stuck because companies cannot measure what they cannot connect. Every one of those arguments is, underneath, the same argument. They are all about intelligence and data winning over scale and access. The hidden cost of time is recovered by intelligence, not by a bigger network. The trip that manages itself is a product of intelligence, not reach. The trustworthy agent and the auditable emission are both products of connected data, not of size. I did not plan it this way, but every piece has been circling the same thesis: the constraint has moved from access to intelligence, and the industry’s structure has not caught up.

Here is what this means concretely for the next ten years, and why I think most of the industry is built for the wrong era.

What this means for the next ten years

The companies that win will not be the ones that assembled the biggest network. They will be the ones that can reason best over the networks that everyone now shares. They will compete on the quality of their judgment, encoded in software: how well they find the right fare in a volatile market, how well they apply a policy without friction, how well they anticipate a disruption before it happens, how well they turn the chaos of available options into a single right answer for a specific traveler. These are not scale advantages. They are intelligence advantages, and they accrue to whoever builds the best reasoning over the best-connected data, regardless of how many offices or aircraft or contracts they hold.

This is why a company founded recently, built natively around connected data and modern intelligence, can now compete with, and often outperform, incumbents many times its size. Not because it has a bigger network, it does not, but because the thing that matters is no longer the size of the network. It is what you can do with the access that everyone now has. The incumbents are not wrong that they have bigger networks. They are wrong that bigger networks are still the point.

And this, finally, is what that opening piece about Brazil was really about, though I did not fully see it at the time.

Back to Brazil

Brazil has the infrastructure, one of the largest airport networks anywhere, and still flies far below its potential. The network is not the binding constraint. The intelligence to use it well, the systems and the data and the reasoning that turn infrastructure into accessible, affordable, well-managed travel, that is the constraint. A country can have an enormous network and underperform it, exactly as a company can have an enormous network and be outcompeted by a smaller, smarter one. The lesson is the same at both scales: the network is necessary but no longer sufficient, and in an era where access is commoditizing, sufficiency lives in the intelligence layered on top.

I will resist the temptation to make this sound more certain than it is. The old logic is not dead; physical networks still matter, and they will keep mattering for a long time. You cannot fly a passenger on intelligence alone. The point is not that scale becomes worthless, but that it stops being the deciding factor, that it moves from being the moat to being the table stakes, the thing you need to have but not the thing that wins. The deciding factor moves up a layer, from the network to the intelligence applied to it.

If I am right, the next decade rewards a different kind of company than the last one did, and a different kind of thinking. It rewards the ones who understood early that access was commoditizing and intelligence was becoming scarce, and who built for the world that is arriving rather than defending the world that is leaving. It rewards the smartest network over the biggest one.

For a hundred years, the question that mattered in travel was “how big is your network?” I think the question that will matter for the next ten years is quieter and harder: “how well can you reason over a network that everyone can now reach?” The companies that have a good answer to that question, regardless of their size, are the ones I would bet on. And the companies still racing to assemble the biggest network, as though access were still the prize, are preparing, with great effort and expense, to win the last war.

The network got us here. The intelligence is what takes us forward. The next decade belongs to whoever understands the difference.

About me

I am an entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience at the intersection of tourism and technology. I am co-founder and Chief Business Officer of VOLL, the largest mobile-first corporate travel and expense management platform in Latin America, and a recognized reference in the development of the corporate travel industry.

A Marketing specialist from Fundação Dom Cabral, I serve on the Tourism Council of FecomércioSP and on the Executive Council of the Latin American Association of Corporate Events and Travel Management (Alagev). A frequent traveler and close observer of human behavior in motion, I write and speak about innovation, digital transformation, entrepreneurial leadership, and the future of corporate travel.

There is a gap in corporate travel that almost no one talks about honestly, because talking about it honestly is uncomfortable for everyone involved. It is the gap between what companies say about sustainable travel and what they are actually able to do about it. And I want to be clear at the outset about where I think the fault lies, because the easy story is the wrong one. The easy story is that companies do not really care, that sustainability is greenwashing, that the intentions are hollow. I do not believe that. The intentions, in my experience, are mostly real. The problem is that intention runs into a wall, and the wall is made of bad data.

Let me start with the intention, because the evidence that it exists is strong.

The intention is real

Nearly 60% of business travelers say they are concerned about the carbon footprint of their work trips, and that concern is influencing how they book and behave. Regulators have made the intention mandatory in large parts of the world: under the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, companies must now disclose Scope 3 emissions, which brings flights, hotels, and ground transport under direct scrutiny. California’s SB 253 will mandate Scope 3 disclosure, including business travel, for large companies doing business in the state, with first reports due in 2027. The pressure is real, it is rising, and it is coming from travelers, from regulators, and from boards simultaneously. By any measure, the will to act exists.

Now look at what companies are actually doing, and the picture collapses.

And then the picture collapses

The GBTA benchmark found that only 14% of companies have set a carbon budget for business travel, and just 7% have established internal carbon fees. Read those two numbers against the 60% of travelers who say they care, and you have the gap in a single line. The concern is nearly universal. The concrete mechanisms to act on it are rare. Something is stopping the intention from becoming action, and it is worth understanding what, because the obvious explanations are wrong.

It is not cost, primarily. It is not even political will, though that fluctuates. The thing that stops most companies from managing travel emissions is more boring and more fundamental than either: they cannot measure them accurately enough to manage them. You cannot set a carbon budget for something you cannot count, and most companies, when they look closely, discover they cannot count their travel emissions with anything like the precision the goal requires.

Here is why, and this is the part that connects to everything I have written about data in this newsletter.

The wall is made of four systems

Corporate travel data flows through at least four separate systems: the TMC, the online booking tool, direct rail bookings, and the expense management platform. Each of these applies its own emission factors, its own distance assumptions, its own treatment of cabin class. A flight booked through the TMC might be calculated with one methodology. A rail ticket bought on a personal card and expensed might be estimated from spend rather than distance. A hotel stay might not be calculated at all. The result is not a clean emissions number with a margin of error. It is four partial pictures that do not reconcile, built on methodologies that produce, by the industry’s own admission, considerably different assessments of the same trip.

This is the wall. A company sets out, in good faith, to reduce its travel emissions. It needs a baseline to set a target against. It goes to assemble that baseline and finds that the number depends entirely on which system you ask and which methodology you trust, and that the off-channel bookings, the trips booked outside the official tools, do not show up at all, creating a reporting gap precisely where the emissions are least visible. The company now faces a choice it never wanted: report a number it knows is shaky, or delay action until the data is better, which in practice means indefinitely. Most choose a third option, which is to make a vague public commitment and quietly never build the carbon budget, because the carbon budget would require a number they do not have. Hence 60% who care and 14% who act.

I find this genuinely important, and not only for environmental reasons, though those matter. I find it important because it is a near-perfect illustration of a principle that runs through this entire field: that you cannot manage what you cannot measure, and that the measurement problem is almost always a data problem in disguise. The sustainability conversation in corporate travel has spent years on the wrong layer. It has debated offsets versus reductions, SAF versus rail, carbon fees versus carbon budgets. Those are real debates. But they are debates about what to do with a number that most companies do not actually have. You cannot choose between offsetting and reducing your emissions if you cannot reliably say what your emissions are.

Let me be fair to the difficulty, because it would be easy to make this sound simpler than it is.

In fairness to the difficulty

Aviation emissions are genuinely hard to calculate well. The underlying problem is large and getting larger: global commercial aviation CO2 rose roughly 30% in just six years before the pandemic, and commercial traffic is growing several times faster than fuel efficiency is improving. The methodologies for attributing a share of a flight’s emissions to a specific traveler in a specific cabin are contested even among experts. Sustainable aviation fuel, the most-discussed lever, currently makes up well under one percent of jet fuel consumption, which means that for now it is more a future hope than a present solution, and accounting for SAF credits through book-and-claim arrangements adds yet another layer of methodological complexity. None of this is easy. I am not pretending the data problem is merely a matter of plugging in the right software.

But I am saying that the data problem is the binding constraint, the thing that has to be solved first, before any of the more interesting debates can produce action rather than rhetoric. And here the sustainability challenge turns out to be the same challenge I keep coming back to from different angles: the cost of fragmentation. The reason a company cannot count its travel emissions is the same reason it cannot see its true travel spend, cannot apply its policy consistently, cannot deploy an AI agent it trusts. The data lives in disconnected systems that were never designed to talk to each other, and every disconnection is a place where accuracy leaks away.

This reframes what good looks like, and it reframes it in a way I find clarifying.

What actually unlocks action

The companies that will actually move on sustainable travel, as opposed to talking about it, are not the ones with the boldest public commitments. They are the ones that have solved the unglamorous data problem underneath. When a company has full-channel, real-time visibility into its travel, the emissions number stops being a guess assembled from four irreconcilable sources and becomes something auditable. And once it is auditable, the whole frozen conversation thaws. You can set a real carbon budget, because you can measure against it. You can give a traveler a per-trip carbon figure at the moment of booking, because you can calculate it consistently. You can build a rail-first prompt for the corridors where rail beats flying, because you can see the corridors. The interventions everyone has been debating become possible the moment the measurement becomes trustworthy, and not one moment before.

This is the through-line that connects sustainability to everything else a well-built travel program does, and it is why I do not think of sustainability as a separate module bolted onto the side of travel management. The same connected data that lets you find the cheapest fair fare, apply policy automatically, and reconcile an expense without human effort is the data that lets you calculate an emission accurately. Sustainability is not a feature you add. It is a byproduct of having gotten the data right, available to any program that did the foundational work and unavailable to any program that did not, no matter how sincere its intentions.

I want to end by returning to the gap, because I think it deserves more honesty than the industry usually gives it.

The gap deserves honesty

When a company announces a sustainable travel commitment and then, two years later, has quietly not built the carbon budget to deliver it, the temptation is to read cynicism into the failure. Sometimes that is right. But far more often, in what I have seen, the failure is not cynicism. It is a company that meant it, ran into the data wall, and did not have the foundation to get over it. The intention was real. The invoice, the actual mess of four systems and incompatible methodologies and invisible off-channel bookings, was where the intention died.

That is why the title of this piece is what it is. Sustainability in corporate travel is not stuck because companies do not care. The data on traveler concern and regulatory pressure says they increasingly do, or are increasingly forced to. It is stuck between intention and invoice: between a genuine desire to travel more responsibly and a measurement reality that makes responsible travel impossible to manage, prove, or improve. The bridge between those two things is not a louder commitment or a better offset. It is connected, trustworthy data, the same bridge that every other hard problem in this industry turns out to require.

Fix that, and sustainability stops being a statement a company makes and becomes a thing a company can actually do. Leave it unfixed, and the gap between intention and invoice will keep swallowing good intentions, one unbuilt carbon budget at a time.

About me

I am an entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience at the intersection of tourism and technology. I am co-founder and Chief Business Officer of VOLL, the largest mobile-first corporate travel and expense management platform in Latin America, and a recognized reference in the development of the corporate travel industry.

A Marketing specialist from Fundação Dom Cabral, I serve on the Tourism Council of FecomércioSP and on the Executive Council of the Latin American Association of Corporate Events and Travel Management (Alagev). A frequent traveler and close observer of human behavior in motion, I write and speak about innovation, digital transformation, entrepreneurial leadership, and the future of corporate travel.

There is a particular kind of mistake that travel managers are making right now, in June and July of 2026, and it comes from a reasonable-sounding assumption. The assumption is this: the World Cup is a football event, our company is not sending anyone to football matches, therefore the World Cup is not our problem. Every part of that reasoning is intuitive. And the conclusion is wrong, in a way that is quietly costing companies money as I write this.

The 2026 World Cup is the largest ever staged: 48 teams, 104 matches, 16 host cities across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, running from June 11 to July 19. It is not a single event in a single place. It is a rolling, six-week, continent-wide demand shock moving from city to city, and it is hitting precisely the metro areas where business travel is most concentrated. New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Atlanta, Seattle, Boston, Toronto, Vancouver, Mexico City. These are not obscure destinations. They are the backbone of the North American corporate travel map. And the tournament is sitting on top of all of them at once.

I want to walk through what the data actually shows, because the story it tells is more nuanced, and more useful, than “prices go up during big events.”

Where the damage shows up first

Start with hotels, which is where the clearest damage shows up. Hotel rates in the eleven US host cities are tracking 40 to 80% above typical summer rates during peak tournament windows, particularly around the knockout rounds and the final in mid-July. Sit with the size of that range. A business trip to New York or Dallas in early July of 2026, booked with no awareness of the tournament calendar, can cost nearly double what the same trip cost a year earlier, for reasons that have nothing to do with the traveler’s business and everything to do with a match schedule they never looked at.

And here is the part that catches companies off guard: the damage is not contained to the host cities. The disruption extends to non-host markets within roughly 100 to 150 miles of host cities, creating a wider zone of elevated travel costs than most planning frameworks anticipate. When a host city fills up, demand spills outward, and the smaller city ninety minutes away, the one your team actually visits, absorbs the overflow. You can be doing business nowhere near a stadium and still pay the stadium’s prices.

Now, the intuitive next assumption is that flights follow the same pattern, surging uniformly across all host cities. They do not, and this is where the data gets genuinely interesting.

The flight picture is a patchwork, not a wave

The air-travel picture is uneven, city by city, match by match. Flight-booking data from the tournament window shows most US and Canadian host cities seeing year-over-year gains, but the distribution is lumpy. Houston is up nearly 13%, Dallas around 10%, Miami and New York close to 8%. But Seattle’s flight bookings are running about 21% lower than the same period last year, and the three Mexican host cities are trailing last year’s pace. As one travel-data executive put it, the demand is real and positive but not evenly distributed across host cities.

Why does this matter for a travel manager? Because it means there is no single rule. “Avoid host cities” is too blunt. Some host cities are seeing air demand spike, and others are actually softer than last year, which means there are pockets of opportunity hiding inside the disruption. The expanded 48-team format created more inventory and more matches, and the lower-profile group-stage games in large stadiums have been harder to fill, which softens demand around certain cities and dates while the marquee matches and the final command Super-Bowl-level scarcity. The pattern is not a wave. It is a patchwork, and you cannot navigate a patchwork with a blanket rule.

This is the central point I want to make, and it is the reason I think this tournament is a better stress test of a travel program than any normal year. A normal year rewards programs that negotiate well and book early. This year punishes both of those instincts when applied blindly. Booking early does not protect you if you book into a host city on a knockout-round weekend. Negotiated rates do not hold when the market rate has doubled around them. The thing that wins in 2026 is not a better discount. It is visibility: knowing, for each trip, which city is spiking and which is soft, which date is in a peak window and which is in a lull, and routing the trip accordingly.

Let me make this concrete with the dimensions a travel program actually has to manage during these six weeks.

Three dimensions to manage

The first is timing. The research identifies specific high-risk windows: the opening weekend of June 11 to 13, the group-stage peak of June 18 to 27, the Round of 16 and quarterfinals from roughly July 4 to 12, and the semifinals and final from July 14 to 19. Travel in or through host-city markets during these windows faces the sharpest rate inflation and the lowest venue availability. A trip that can move a week in either direction can often step out of a peak window entirely. But you can only do that if someone is looking at the tournament calendar alongside the travel calendar, which is exactly the connection most companies never make.

The second is geography, and it is more flexible than people assume. Because the demand is concentrated around stadiums and fan zones, a hotel choice two or three neighborhoods away from the venue, or in an adjacent town outside the direct stadium corridor, can cut the rate dramatically without changing the business purpose of the trip. The companies managing this well are not cancelling trips. They are pivoting the specifics, nudging a hotel here, a date there, an alternate airport in a softer city, and preserving the business while sidestepping the worst of the pricing.

The third dimension is the one almost nobody budgets for, and it is the reason I think this tournament deserves a travel manager’s attention even if not a single employee is going near a match. It is the duty-of-care and disruption dimension. Host cities are facing rolling waves of activity across June and July: match days, fan zones drawing tens of thousands daily, team arrivals, media surges, security lockdowns. Airports in these cities are running at intense concentration, with long lines and a thin margin for missed connections. A routine business trip routed through a host-city airport on a match day is exposed to delays, security perimeters, and ground-transport chaos that have nothing to do with the traveler and everything to do with the tournament. This is not a pricing problem. It is an operational and safety one, and it is precisely the kind of thing that surfaces in the fifteenth hour, when a trip breaks far from home and someone has to solve it.

So what does good look like, in practice, over these six weeks?

What good looks like

It looks like a travel program that has overlaid the tournament calendar onto its own travel patterns and can see, in advance, which of its routine trips are about to walk into a spike. It looks like flexibility built into policy for this specific window: permission to shift a date, to choose an alternate airport, to book a hotel outside the venue corridor, without a traveler having to fight the policy to do the sensible thing. It looks like visibility into the patchwork, so the program exploits the soft cities and dates instead of treating every host city as uniformly expensive. And it looks like a support layer ready for the operational disruption, because some of these trips will break, and the difference between a managed disruption and a stranded employee is the whole game.

The companies doing this well, by the available analysis, share one trait: they recognized the structural nature of the disruption early and responded with concrete scheduling, destination, and contracting strategies, rather than treating the tournament as background noise. The ones doing it badly are the ones still operating on the reasonable-sounding assumption I opened with, that a football event is a problem for football fans.

There is a broader lesson here that outlasts the tournament, and it is the reason I find this case worth writing about beyond its novelty.

The lesson that outlasts the tournament

The World Cup is an extreme, compressed, visible version of something that is true all the time: that the price of a business trip is shaped by forces that have nothing to do with the business and everything to do with whatever else is happening in that city on that date. A conference, a holiday weekend, a festival, a weather event. The tournament just makes the dynamic impossible to ignore, because it is enormous and it is on the calendar in advance. Most of the time the dynamic is subtler, and most companies never see it, which means they pay for it without knowing they are paying.

What the World Cup should teach a travel manager is not “here is how to survive June and July of 2026.” It is “here is proof that visibility into external demand is worth money, and here is a six-week window where the cost of not having it is too large to miss.” The companies that come out of this summer having managed it well will have learned something they can apply for years: that the smartest travel program is not the one with the best rates, but the one that can see what is about to happen to a city before it sends someone there.

The tournament will end on July 19. The lesson should not. Somewhere in your travel data right now there is a trip booked into a host city on a knockout weekend, at a rate someone accepted without knowing why it was so high. Multiply that by the size of your program and you have the cost of not looking. The World Cup just made it big enough, and obvious enough, that this is the year to start.

About me

I am an entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience at the intersection of tourism and technology. I am co-founder and Chief Business Officer of VOLL, the largest mobile-first corporate travel and expense management platform in Latin America, and a recognized reference in the development of the corporate travel industry.

A Marketing specialist from Fundação Dom Cabral, I serve on the Tourism Council of FecomércioSP and on the Executive Council of the Latin American Association of Corporate Events and Travel Management (Alagev). A frequent traveler and close observer of human behavior in motion, I write and speak about innovation, digital transformation, entrepreneurial leadership, and the future of corporate travel.

It is eleven at night in a city that is not home. The flight that was supposed to leave at nine has been cancelled, not delayed, cancelled, and the board now shows the next option leaving at six in the morning. The gate agent has a line forty people deep and a tone of voice that has given up. Somewhere in that line is a director who has a board meeting at eight, in a different city, that cannot move. She has done everything right. She booked in policy, she arrived early, she is exactly where the system told her to be. And none of it matters now, because the trip has broken, and the question that decides how the rest of her night goes is brutally simple.

Who answers?

I have come to think of this as the 23h problem, the eleven-o’clock problem, and I think it is the truest test of a travel program that exists. Not the booking. Not the savings report. Not the slick app. Those are the easy hours, the fourteen hours when everything works and any system looks competent. The measure of a program is the fifteenth hour, the one where it all falls apart, far from home, late at night, with a real consequence waiting on the other side of the disruption.

Most of the conversation in corporate travel technology is about the easy hours. It is about the search, the comparison, the policy compliance, the dashboard. All of that matters, and I have spent years building it. But I want to argue that the easy hours are table stakes, and that the entire differentiation, the thing that actually earns a traveler’s trust and a company’s loyalty, lives in the fifteenth hour. In what happens at 23h, when the trip breaks.

Let me describe what usually happens, because most people reading this have lived some version of it.

The traveler, standing in that line, pulls out their phone. They open the app they booked through. And here is the first fork in the road, the one that tells you everything about how the program was designed. Either the app is a tool that hands the problem back to the traveler, a search interface that says, in effect, “here are your options, good luck”, or there is a human, or something that behaves with the judgment of a human, already working the problem on the traveler’s behalf.

The first kind of app is the cockpit I have written about before. It is very good during the easy hours and nearly useless in the fifteenth, because the last thing a tired, stranded person at 23h needs is to become their own travel agent. They do not want options. They want the problem solved. The cognitive load of researching alternative flights, checking what is in policy, rebooking, and finding a hotel for the night is exactly the load they have the least capacity to carry at that moment. Handing it back to them, however elegantly, is a kind of abandonment dressed up as self-service.

The second kind is rarer and harder to build, and it is the only kind that actually works when it matters. It is a program where, the moment the flight cancels, someone or something is already moving. The rebooking is being worked before the traveler reaches the front of the line. The hotel for the night is being arranged. The traveler’s phone does not present a puzzle; it presents a plan. “Your nine o’clock is cancelled. We have rebooked you on the six a.m., here is your seat, we have held a room at the airport hotel tonight, and your car will be there in twenty minutes.” The difference between those two experiences is the difference between a traveler who trusts the program with their life and a traveler who quietly starts looking for a different one.

Here is the part that I think the industry has gotten backwards for years. We have treated support as a cost center, a thing to be minimized, automated away, deflected into a chatbot or an FAQ. And for the easy hours, that instinct is fine, even correct, because the easy hours genuinely do not need much human attention. But the fifteenth hour is not a cost to be minimized. It is the moment the entire relationship is decided. A company can deliver fourteen perfect hours a thousand times, and one botched fifteenth hour, one night a director spent stranded and alone with a dead app, will undo all of it. Trust in a travel program is not built in the easy hours. It is built, or destroyed, in the fifteenth.

This is where I want to be careful, because it would be easy to turn this into an argument that technology is the problem and humans are the answer. That is too simple, and it is not what I believe.

The truth is more interesting. The fifteenth hour is precisely where technology and human service have to work together, each doing what it is best at, or the whole thing fails. Technology’s job is to see the disruption coming and to start solving it before the human even knows there is a problem. A good system knows the flight is going to cancel before the gate agent announces it, because the data is already moving. It can begin the rebooking automatically, surface the options, hold the inventory. That is work no human could do at the speed required, across thousands of simultaneous travelers. The machine is extraordinary at the fifteenth hour, right up to the edge of where it stops being extraordinary.

And that edge is real. Because sometimes the fifteenth hour is not a logistics problem. Sometimes it is a human one. The traveler is not just stranded; they are frightened, or grieving, or at the end of their rope after the third thing to go wrong that day. The board meeting is not just a calendar entry; it is the most important presentation of their career. In that moment, what the traveler needs is not only an optimized rebooking. It is a human voice that understands the weight of the situation and responds to the person, not just the itinerary. The machine can hand the traveler a perfect plan and still miss that they needed, for thirty seconds, to be treated as a person who is having a hard night.

So the architecture of a good answer to the 23h problem is layered. The technology handles the speed and the scale, the seeing-it-coming and the instant rebooking, so that the vast majority of fifteenth hours resolve themselves before they become a crisis. And the human is held in reserve for the moments that are genuinely human, freed up to be present for them precisely because the machine has handled everything that did not require a person. The technology does not replace the human in the fifteenth hour. It clears the noise so the human can be there for the part that actually needs them.

This is the conviction that sits underneath how we built VOLL, and the 23h problem is, in a sense, the problem we are most obsessed with. Not because the easy hours do not matter, but because we decided early that a travel program earns its keep in the fifteenth hour, and that a program which abandons the traveler at 23h has failed no matter how good its search interface is. It is the reason the platform was built with service in its DNA rather than bolted on as an afterthought, and the reason the technology and the human support are designed to work as one thing rather than two.

But I am not writing this to talk about us. I am writing it because I think the 23h problem is the right lens for anyone evaluating how they handle travel, regardless of what tools they use. The questions it raises are simple and they cut through all the noise of features and dashboards.

When your traveler’s flight cancels at eleven at night, what actually happens? Does your program hand them a search bar, or does it hand them a plan? Is someone, or something, already working the problem before they reach the front of the line? And when the situation stops being about logistics and becomes about a person having a genuinely bad night, is there a human reachable, or does the trail end at a chatbot that loops them back to the FAQ?

Most companies have never asked these questions, because they evaluated their travel program during the easy hours, when everything works and every option looks fine. The easy hours are a bad test. They tell you nothing, because almost anything passes them. The fifteenth hour is the only test that matters, and it is the one almost no one runs before they need the answer.

The director in that line will remember this night. She will remember it far more vividly than the fourteen perfect hours that preceded it, because that is how human memory works; we remember the moment things broke and who showed up. And whatever shows up for her at 23h, the plan or the puzzle, the human voice or the dead app, will become, for her, what the travel program actually is. Everything else was just the easy hours.

The trip will break. It always, eventually, breaks. The only question that was ever worth asking is who answers when it does.

About me

I am an entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience at the intersection of tourism and technology. I am co-founder and Chief Business Officer of VOLL, the largest mobile-first corporate travel and expense management platform in Latin America, and a recognized reference in the development of the corporate travel industry.

A Marketing specialist from Fundação Dom Cabral, I serve on the Tourism Council of FecomércioSP and on the Executive Council of the Latin American Association of Corporate Events and Travel Management (Alagev). A frequent traveler and close observer of human behavior in motion, I write and speak about innovation, digital transformation, entrepreneurial leadership, and the future of corporate travel.

The most repeated promise in corporate travel right now is some version of this: soon, an AI agent will plan, book, and manage your business trips end to end. The traveler will state an intention, the agent will handle the rest, and the whole apparatus of searching, comparing, and reconciling will dissolve into the background. It is a good promise. I believe most of it. And I think it is about to collide, hard, with a problem that almost no one in the marketing material wants to talk about.

The problem is data. Specifically, the gap between how good the agents have become and how bad most companies’ data still is.

The number nobody puts on the slide

Let me start with the numbers, because they are stark and they are recent. Across enterprises in 2026, the experimental phase of agentic AI is clearly over: by one widely cited Gartner figure, 40% of enterprise applications are expected to embed task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026, up from under 5% in 2025. Adoption, in the sense of trying agents somewhere, is now nearly universal. And yet the same body of research keeps surfacing a second, far less flattering number. Almost four in five enterprises have adopted AI agents in some form, yet only one in nine runs them in production. The distance between those two figures is the whole story.

Why do so many agent projects stall between pilot and production? The research is unusually consistent on the answer, and it is not that the models are not smart enough. IDC research found that 88% of AI pilots fail to reach production, with failures clustering on governance, data-readiness, and observability gaps rather than model quality. Read that again, because it inverts the intuition most people have. The bottleneck is not the intelligence of the agent. It is the state of the ground the agent is asked to walk on.

The single most-cited barrier makes this concrete. 52% of businesses cite data quality and availability as the biggest barriers to AI adoption, and 37% of organizations face data quality problems for AI readiness. The verdict that accompanies these figures has become something of a refrain in the field, and it is worth stating plainly: agents are only as good as the data they can access, and you cannot build AI agents with poor data infrastructure and expect better outcomes.

I want to bring this out of the abstract and into the specific texture of corporate travel, because this is where I have watched the principle play out, and where the stakes are unusually high.

What an agent actually needs to book a trip

Think about what an AI agent actually needs in order to book a business trip well. It needs to know the company’s travel policy, not as a PDF written in legalese, but as structured rules it can apply at the moment of decision. It needs to know the traveler’s history and preferences. It needs live access to fares across multiple distribution channels, because the cheapest option frequently is not the one a single conventional search surfaces. It needs the corporate agreements, the negotiated rates, the cost-center logic, the approval chains. It needs to know which hotels are in policy in which cities on which dates. And critically, it needs all of this to be connected, consistent, and current, because the agent is going to act on it autonomously, without a human double-checking each step.

Now consider the reality inside most companies. The policy lives in one document. The traveler history lives in the booking tool, or several booking tools. The card transactions live in the bank’s portal. The receipts live in employees’ pockets and phone galleries. The corporate agreements live in spreadsheets maintained by someone in procurement. The approval rules live partly in software and partly in people’s heads. None of these talk to each other cleanly. Every handoff between them is a place where data is lost, duplicated, or contradicted.

A confident mistake is still a mistake

Drop a capable AI agent into that environment and here is what happens. The agent does not save you from the mess. It acts on the mess, confidently and quickly. It books against a policy that was out of date. It misses the negotiated rate because the agreement was in a spreadsheet it could not read. It approves an expense that should have been flagged because the cost-center mapping was wrong. And because the agent is autonomous, these errors do not announce themselves the way a human’s hesitation would. They surface later, at scale, after the damage is done.

This is the part of the agentic future that the hype skips, and it is the part that separates the companies that will get value from agents from the companies that will get a faster, more confident version of their existing problems. The leaders in the field have started saying this out loud. McKinsey’s 2026 data shows the benchmark question has changed: “Are we using AI?” stopped being useful, and “Have we redesigned a workflow around AI and can we prove it?” is the 2026 question. Broad usage is cheap. License counts grow and dashboards light up. Scaled usage is rare, because it requires the unglamorous work that has to happen underneath: connecting the systems, cleaning the data, structuring the rules so a machine can read them.

There is a financial edge to this that should concern anyone running a travel program. IDC predicts a 15% productivity loss by 2027 for companies that fail to establish AI-ready data foundations. That is not a missed opportunity cost. That is a projected decline, the price of layering autonomous systems on top of disconnected data and letting them run. The companies that win will not be the ones with the most agents. By one account, the question is no longer if you will use AI agents, but how you will govern them, and the companies that stay ahead will not have the most agents but the best orchestration, balancing the throughput of AI with strategic human oversight.

This is the conviction that has shaped how we built VOLL, and I will be direct about it because it is the whole point of the argument.

The sequence is the thing

We did not start by building an agent and then go looking for data to feed it. We started from the opposite end. We built a platform where the booking, the policy, the expense, the payment, and the corporate agreements live in one connected environment, captured as the activity happens rather than reconstructed afterward. The agents came after, and they came after on purpose, because an agent is only worth deploying once the ground beneath it is solid. When our agents act, they act on data that is already connected and current, which is the only condition under which autonomous action is safe rather than reckless.

I am not saying this to claim we have solved a problem the rest of the industry has not. I am saying it because the sequence matters, and the sequence is the thing most companies get wrong. They want the agent first, because the agent is the exciting part, the part you can demo. The data foundation is the boring part, the part with no demo. And so the natural temptation is to bolt an agent onto whatever data you happen to have and hope the intelligence of the model compensates for the mess underneath. The research is now clear that it does not. The model cannot out-think bad data. It can only act on it faster.

So if you are a leader looking at the agentic future of travel and wondering how to prepare, I would offer a reframing of the question.

The question worth asking first

The question is not “which agent should we adopt?” That question, asked first, leads you straight into the 88% that never reach production. The better question, the one the data supports, is “is our data ready to be acted on autonomously?” Can an agent see your policy as a rule rather than a document? Can it reach your negotiated rates? Can it reconcile an expense without a human reassembling the context from scratch? If the answer to those is no, then the most valuable thing you can do this year is not buy an agent. It is fix the ground the agent will stand on.

There is a version of the next few years where corporate travel genuinely transforms, where the trip really does manage itself, where the traveler states an intention and the rest dissolves into a well-governed background process. I believe in that version. I am building toward it. But it does not arrive by deploying smarter and smarter agents onto messier and messier data. It arrives the other way around, by doing the patient, unglamorous work of making the data worth acting on, and only then handing it to agents capable of acting.

The agent is the part everyone wants to talk about. The data is the part that decides whether the agent saves you money or just makes expensive mistakes with more confidence than you could have managed on your own. Your AI travel agent will be only as good as your worst data. It is worth knowing, before you deploy one, exactly how bad your worst data is.

About me

I am an entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience at the intersection of tourism and technology. I am co-founder and Chief Business Officer of VOLL, the largest mobile-first corporate travel and expense management platform in Latin America, and a recognized reference in the development of the corporate travel industry.

A Marketing specialist from Fundação Dom Cabral, I serve on the Tourism Council of FecomércioSP and on the Executive Council of the Latin American Association of Corporate Events and Travel Management (Alagev). A frequent traveler and close observer of human behavior in motion, I write and speak about innovation, digital transformation, entrepreneurial leadership, and the future of corporate travel.

The first thing they give you is a uniform that does not quite fit, and a position by the door.

I was a teenager. The hotel was not glamorous, whatever the word “hotel” might conjure. My job, in its entirety, was to be useful to people who were arriving somewhere tired and leaving somewhere hurried, and who mostly did not see me. I carried bags. I called taxis. I gave directions to restaurants I could not afford to eat in. I learned the precise weight of a suitcase that someone has overpacked for a trip they are anxious about, which is heavier than the same suitcase packed by someone going somewhere they want to go. You learn to feel the difference. The bag tells you before the face does.

I did not know it then, but I was getting an education that no school sells, and that I have spent the rest of my life drawing on.

What the lobby teaches

Here is what the lobby teaches you, if you are paying attention. It teaches you that almost no one who walks through a hotel door is actually thinking about the hotel. They are thinking about the meeting tomorrow, the flight they nearly missed, the child they left at home, the deal that might fall through, the parent in the hospital. The hotel is the last thing on their mind and the first thing standing between them and rest. Your entire job, the real job underneath the bag-carrying, is to remove yourself and every obstacle behind you from a person who has more important things to hold.

The best people I worked with understood this without ever saying it. There was an older doorman, a man who had stood at that same entrance for longer than I had been alive, and I watched him do something I have never forgotten. A guest would come through the doors, and before they had said a word, he had already read them. He knew who needed a warm greeting and who needed to be left alone. He knew which traveler wanted directions and which one wanted to be told, gently, that everything was handled and they did not need to worry. He was not a mind reader. He was just paying a kind of attention that the rest of the world had stopped paying. He treated each arrival as a person with a context he could not fully see but could respect.

I wanted to be good at that. For a long time, being good at that was the whole of my ambition.

What the lobby teaches

The trouble with a lobby, though, is that it shows you the problem one person at a time. You solve it beautifully for the guest in front of you, and then the doors open and there is another, and the solving starts over. The wisdom does not scale. A great doorman can change the day of every person who passes through his door, and the number of people who pass through his door in a lifetime is, in the scheme of things, small. I started to feel the edges of that. I could see the craft. I could not see how to give it to more than one person at a time.

That tension is what eventually pushed me out of the lobby and into the rest of my career, though it took years to understand that was what had happened. I moved into the business of travel. I learned the industry from the operational side, the part travelers never see: the contracts, the systems, the logistics, the way an entire trip is assembled from a hundred small arrangements that have to align. And I kept noticing, in every company I worked with, the same thing I had felt at the door. The systems were built to process travelers, not to attend to them. They were efficient in the way a conveyor belt is efficient. They moved people through. But the attention, the reading-of-the-person that the old doorman did instinctively, had been engineered out, because attention does not scale and conveyor belts do.

This is the part of the story where, if it were a tidy fable, I would tell you I set out to fix it. The truth is messier.

What I have spent my life building

I did not have a grand plan. I had an irritation, a sense that something valuable had been lost in the trade for scale, and a slowly growing conviction that the trade might not be necessary. That maybe the choice between attention and scale was a false one. That the thing the doorman did, the reading and the anticipating and the quiet removal of obstacles, might be encodable after all, not to replace him but to extend his reach to the thousands of travelers he would never personally meet.

That conviction is, in the end, what I have spent my professional life building toward. Technology for travel that does not feel like a conveyor belt. Systems that try to do what the doorman did: notice what the traveler needs before they have to ask, handle what can be handled invisibly, and reserve the human moment for when it actually matters. When people ask me why someone who runs a technology company talks so much about service, this is the answer. I do not see them as opposites. I see the technology as the only way to give the service the scale it never had when it lived only in the instincts of one man at one door.

I have learned, building this, where the line sits between what a machine can do and what it cannot, and the line is not where most people assume.

Where the machine ends and the person begins

A machine can be extraordinary at the parts of hospitality that are really pattern and memory. It can remember that this traveler always wants the early flight, prefers the aisle, hates the layover in a particular airport. It can notice that a flight is about to be cancelled before the traveler does and have the alternative ready. It can apply, consistently and without fatigue, the thousand small rules that a great concierge applies from experience. These are not trivial. They are, in fact, most of what good service consists of, and a machine that does them well gives the traveler something the overworked human system often cannot: reliability.

But there is a thing the machine cannot do, and it is the thing the doorman did best. It cannot care. It can simulate the outputs of caring, often convincingly, but it does not feel the weight of the overpacked bag. It does not know, in the way a person knows, that the traveler in front of it is frightened or grieving or quietly falling apart behind a composed face. And every so often, that knowing is the only thing that matters. The trip falls apart at midnight, and what the traveler needs is not an optimized rebooking but a human voice that understands this is the third thing to go wrong today and responds to the person, not just the problem.

So the work, as I have come to understand it, is not to replace the doorman with a machine. It is to use the machine for everything the machine does well, the patterns and the memory and the tireless handling of logistics, precisely so that the human attention, which is scarce and precious, can be saved for the moments that actually require it. The technology does not eliminate the human. It clears space for the human to matter where they matter most. Done right, it is the doorman’s wisdom finally given the reach it always deserved.

A machine can be extraordinary at the parts of hospitality that are really pattern and memory. It can remember that this traveler always wants the early flight, prefers the aisle, hates the layover in a particular airport. It can notice that a flight is about to be cancelled before the traveler does and have the alternative ready. It can apply, consistently and without fatigue, the thousand small rules that a great concierge applies from experience. These are not trivial. They are, in fact, most of what good service consists of, and a machine that does them well gives the traveler something the overworked human system often cannot: reliability.

But there is a thing the machine cannot do, and it is the thing the doorman did best. It cannot care. It can simulate the outputs of caring, often convincingly, but it does not feel the weight of the overpacked bag. It does not know, in the way a person knows, that the traveler in front of it is frightened or grieving or quietly falling apart behind a composed face. And every so often, that knowing is the only thing that matters. The trip falls apart at midnight, and what the traveler needs is not an optimized rebooking but a human voice that understands this is the third thing to go wrong today and responds to the person, not just the problem.

So the work, as I have come to understand it, is not to replace the doorman with a machine. It is to use the machine for everything the machine does well, the patterns and the memory and the tireless handling of logistics, precisely so that the human attention, which is scarce and precious, can be saved for the moments that actually require it. The technology does not eliminate the human. It clears space for the human to matter where they matter most. Done right, it is the doorman’s wisdom finally given the reach it always deserved.

The suitcase and the person

I think about that lobby more than I expected to, all these years later. I have sat in rooms I never imagined I would sit in, made decisions about businesses larger than that hotel could have dreamed of being. And the thing that has stayed with me, the compass I keep returning to, is not anything I learned in those rooms. It is the weight of a stranger’s suitcase, and what it told me about the person carrying it, and a doorman who taught me that the highest form of service is to see the person clearly and then quietly carry what you can.

There is a temptation, when you build technology, to believe the technology is the point. It is not. The technology is the suitcase. It is the thing you carry so that the person does not have to. The point was always the person, the one arriving tired with their mind full of more important things, who deserves to have the obstacles removed without having to ask. I learned that before I knew anything else about this industry. Everything I have built since has been, in one way or another, an attempt to do it at a scale that one teenager by a door never could.

The uniform did not fit, back then. But the lesson did. It has fit my whole life.

About me

I am an entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience at the intersection of tourism and technology. I am co-founder and Chief Business Officer of VOLL, the largest mobile-first corporate travel and expense management platform in Latin America, and a recognized reference in the development of the corporate travel industry.

A Marketing specialist from Fundação Dom Cabral, I serve on the Tourism Council of FecomércioSP and on the Executive Council of the Latin American Association of Corporate Events and Travel Management (Alagev). A frequent traveler and close observer of human behavior in motion, I write and speak about innovation, digital transformation, entrepreneurial leadership, and the future of corporate travel.

For years, the travel industry talked about “bleisure” the way it talks about most things: as a trend, a buzzword, something to put on a conference slide and forget. The blending of business and leisure travel was treated as a nice-to-have, a soft benefit, the kind of thing you mention in a wellness section of the employee handbook. I want to argue that this framing is now obsolete, and that the data has quietly moved bleisure from the margins to the center of how corporate travel actually works.

The clearest way to see this is in the numbers, so let me lay them out before interpreting them.

What the global numbers say

Start with adoption, which has crossed the threshold from minority behavior to majority behavior. According to GBTA, the Global Business Travel Association, bleisure now appears in 60% of US managed business trips, up from 43% in 2019. When a behavior shows up in three out of five managed trips, it is no longer an exception to the business trip. It is a property of the business trip. Other surveys put the appetite even higher: one US study found that 84% of travelers wanted to include vacation time on their next corporate trip, and a Navan and Skift report found that 55% of business travelers took at least two blended trips in a single year.

Then look at the market behind the behavior. The global bleisure market was valued at around $816 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach roughly $962 billion in 2026, growing at a double-digit annual rate. These are not the numbers of a passing fad. They are the numbers of a structural shift in how a very large category of travel is being consumed.

And the demographic signal underneath is the part that should make any employer pay attention. The appetite for blended travel is not evenly distributed. It concentrates sharply among the people entering and rising through the workforce. By one figure, 59% of Gen Z and 65% of millennial workers choose employers specifically for blended travel flexibility. GBTA has found that millennials are the age group most likely to take bleisure trips. This means bleisure has quietly become a recruitment and retention lever, not just a travel-policy footnote. When the majority of your younger talent is factoring travel flexibility into where they choose to work, the design of your travel program has become a question of talent strategy.

So that is the global picture: majority adoption, a near-trillion-dollar market, and a generational pull that ties travel flexibility to talent. Now I want to bring this home to Brazil, because the Brazilian data tells the same story from a different angle, and because the institutions tracking it deserve more attention than they get internationally.

The same story, told in Brazil

The Brazilian corporate travel market is measured carefully, in a partnership between FecomercioSP, the federation of commerce, services, and tourism for the state of São Paulo, and Alagev, the Latin American association for the management of corporate events and travel. Their joint Corporate Travel Survey is the most authoritative read on the market in Brazil, and the recent figures are striking. The sector closed 2025 with a record, around R$147.8 billion in movement, a growth of roughly 6% and the strongest result in a series that goes back to 2011. This is a market not in recovery but in consolidation, as Alagev’s own leadership has put it, having moved past the language of “rebound” into a mature, data-oriented phase.

What makes the Brazilian case relevant to the bleisure argument is the context in which this growth is happening. The same FecomercioSP and Alagev tracking shows that the blending of business and leisure is gaining force precisely as hybrid work models become permanent, and that companies are adopting the practice deliberately, as a strategy to promote wellbeing and retain talent. The Brazilian market is not importing bleisure as a foreign trend. It is arriving at the same destination as the global market, through the same door: a workforce that increasingly refuses to treat the work trip and the personal trip as separate categories.

Now, having laid out the data, I want to do the harder thing, which is to take the consequences seriously, because this is where most discussions of bleisure stop short. If bleisure is structural rather than incidental, then it changes three things about how a company has to think, and none of them are soft.

What changes when the trip blends

The first is cost and demand dynamics. When business travelers extend trips for leisure, and when the majority of trips now carry that extension, the corporate traveler is no longer moving through the calendar on a purely business rhythm. They are increasingly traveling on the same days, to the same desirable places, as leisure travelers. This collides directly with something I have written about before: the competition for inventory. When a business trip gets extended over a weekend, that traveler is now bidding for a Friday or Sunday night hotel room against tourists, in a market where, as the Brazilian data shows, hotel rates in São Paulo can exceed R$900 on high-demand days. The blending of the trip blends the traveler into the leisure demand curve, with all the price volatility that implies. A travel program that still models its travelers as moving on a clean Monday-to-Thursday business rhythm is modeling a traveler who increasingly does not exist.

The second thing it changes is policy and compliance, and this is the part that quietly leaks money. When a trip has a business portion and a leisure portion, someone has to draw the line between them, and that line is where governance gets messy. GBTA’s data is precise on the scale of this: the average bleisure extension is about 2.3 days, and while 71% of travelers who extend pay for the leisure portion themselves, 18% expense incidentals back to the employer in violation of policy. Read that 18% carefully. Nearly one in five blended trips involves a compliance leak, not out of malice but because the boundary between the business expense and the personal expense was never cleanly drawn or enforced. When bleisure was a rare exception, this leak was a rounding error. Now that it appears in the majority of trips, it is a systematic cost, and the only thing that contains it is a travel program with the clarity to separate the two portions automatically rather than relying on the traveler’s honesty and memory weeks later.

The third thing it changes is the most strategic, and it is about why companies travel at all. There is a temptation to see bleisure as travelers taking advantage, squeezing personal benefit out of company trips. The data points the other way. Research consistently links blended travel to outcomes companies actually want. By various surveys, business travelers who add leisure time report markedly better work-life balance than those who do not, a large majority of American business travelers say their travel experiences influence their overall job satisfaction, and a majority of employees say that traveling and seeing new places makes them more productive at work. In other words, the leisure extension is not a leak in the value of the business trip. It is part of what makes the business trip something employees are willing, even eager, to do. In a period where companies are fighting both to justify travel budgets and to retain younger talent, that willingness is not a soft benefit. It is the thing that keeps the whole enterprise of business travel viable.

Put those three consequences together and you arrive at the argument in the title. Bleisure is not a trend you can choose to ride or ignore. It is the new shape of the business trip, and the shape has implications for cost, for compliance, and for talent that a company cannot opt out of simply by not having a policy.

The trip no longer ends with the meeting

The choice is not whether bleisure happens. The majority data settles that. The choice is whether your travel program is designed to handle a blended trip cleanly or whether it pretends, against the evidence, that the business trip still ends the moment the meeting does.

This is why I find the institutional tracking so valuable, and why I keep pointing people toward bodies like GBTA globally and Alagev and FecomercioSP in Brazil. They are doing the unglamorous work of measuring a shift that is easy to dismiss anecdotally and hard to dismiss once you see the numbers. GBTA reports that 43% of travel programs now have formal bleisure policies, up from almost none a few years ago. That figure is rising for a reason. The programs adding formal policies are the ones that have understood that an unmanaged majority behavior is just risk, and that the way to turn bleisure from a liability into an asset is to design for it deliberately.

I will end with the reframing I find most useful. For a long time, the implicit model of the business trip was a transaction: the company buys the travel, the employee delivers the work, the trip ends, everyone goes home. Bleisure breaks that model, and the data says it has already broken it for most trips. The new model is not a transaction but a blend, where the company’s interest in a productive, retained, willing employee and the employee’s interest in a life that does not end at the airport are no longer in opposition but woven together.

The companies that see this clearly will design travel programs that handle the blend with precision: separating the expenses cleanly, planning around the new demand dynamics, treating the leisure extension as a retention asset rather than a compliance headache. The companies that do not will keep running programs built for a traveler who clocked out the moment the meeting ended, and who, according to the majority of the data, no longer exists.

Bleisure is not a trend. It is the shape of the thing now. The only question left is whether your program has noticed.

About me

I am an entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience at the intersection of tourism and technology. I am co-founder and Chief Business Officer of VOLL, the largest mobile-first corporate travel and expense management platform in Latin America, and a recognized reference in the development of the corporate travel industry.

A Marketing specialist from Fundação Dom Cabral, I serve on the Tourism Council of FecomércioSP and on the Executive Council of the Latin American Association of Corporate Events and Travel Management (Alagev). A frequent traveler and close observer of human behavior in motion, I write and speak about innovation, digital transformation, entrepreneurial leadership, and the future of corporate travel.

There is a question I have learned to ask whenever someone shows me a new piece of travel technology, and it tends to make the room uncomfortable. The question is simple: what is the ideal number of times a business traveler should have to open your app on a given trip?

The instinctive answer, the one that product teams have been trained to give, is some version of “as often as it’s useful.” More engagement, more touchpoints, more daily active users. That is how we have been taught to measure whether software is good. And I think, for this particular category of software, it is exactly backwards.

The honest answer, the one that takes a second to arrive at, is zero. Or as close to zero as the laws of physics allow. The best business trip is the one the traveler barely remembers managing, because there was almost nothing to manage. They had a reason to travel, they traveled, the logistics arranged themselves quietly in the background, and at no point did the tooling demand a share of their attention that the trip itself had not earned.

This is not how the industry has built things, and it is worth understanding why.

For most of the history of corporate travel technology, the goal was access. The traveler, or more often an assistant or an agent, needed a way to see inventory, compare options, and make a booking. The interface was the product, because the interface was the only way to reach the thing you wanted. Every improvement was an improvement to the interface: a cleaner search, a faster results page, a more legible itinerary. We got very good at this. The booking tools of today are dramatically better than the green-screen terminals of twenty years ago.

But somewhere in that long march of interface improvement, a quiet substitution happened. We started treating the quality of the interface as the goal itself, rather than as a means to an end that the traveler actually cared about. We optimized the cockpit. We made the dials clearer and the buttons more responsive and the layout more intuitive. And we lost sight of the fact that the traveler never wanted to fly the plane. They wanted to arrive.

I want to be precise about the distinction I am drawing, because it is easy to nod along and miss it. There is a difference between making a task easier and removing the task from the person. These are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where most of the opportunity in this category now sits.

Making a task easier is what the industry has done well. The booking flow that took fifteen minutes now takes five. The expense report that required keeping paper receipts now accepts a photo. The approval that used to mean an email chain now happens with a tap. Each of these is a genuine improvement, and each of them still leaves the traveler doing the task. Booking, filing, approving, tapping. The friction is lower, but the work is still theirs.

Removing the task from the person is a different proposition entirely. It means the booking happens without the traveler running a search. It means the expense reconciles itself because the data was captured at the moment of spending, not reconstructed afterward from memory and receipts. It means the policy is not a document the traveler reads and applies, but a rail the trip already runs on, so the compliant option is simply the option that appears. In each case the measure of success is not how elegantly the traveler completes the task. It is how completely the task has stopped being theirs to complete.

The reason this matters is not aesthetic. It is economic, and it is human, and the two are connected.

Consider what a business traveler’s attention is actually for. A company spends real money to put a person in a particular city, in a particular room, in front of a particular client or colleague or factory floor. The entire justification for the trip is that the person’s judgment, presence, and attention will produce something valuable while they are there. That attention is the asset. It is the whole point.

Now consider what the conventional travel program does to that asset. It asks the traveler to spend a portion of it on logistics. To compare flight options. To worry about whether the hotel they picked is within policy. To keep the receipts. To photograph the receipts. To remember, three weeks later, what the dinner on the second night was for. Every one of these is a small withdrawal from the exact account the trip was meant to fill. The company pays to deploy the person’s attention and then quietly claws part of it back through the overhead of managing the deployment.

When you frame it this way, the goal of travel technology stops being “make the traveler more efficient at these tasks” and becomes “stop spending the traveler’s attention on these tasks at all.” Efficiency is a consolation prize. It is what you optimize for when you have given up on removal. The real target is absence: the trip that required almost nothing of the traveler beyond showing up and doing the thing they came to do.

This is the lens through which I think the arrival of capable AI agents should be understood, and also the lens that protects us from the hype around them.

The genuine promise of an agent in this context is not that it gives the traveler a smarter assistant to converse with. A chatbot that helps you book a flight faster is still a cockpit, just with a friendlier voice. The promise is that the agent does the thing, so the person does not have to. It books the compliant flight. It rebooks when the flight is cancelled. It flags the out-of-policy expense before it becomes a problem at month-end. The traveler’s involvement trends toward the zero we started with, which is exactly where they always wanted it to be.

But there is a condition attached to this promise, and it is the part the hype tends to skip. An agent that acts on your behalf is only as trustworthy as the information it acts on. An agent is a decision-maker, and a decision-maker fed bad data does not save you from thinking. It makes confident mistakes quickly, and then hands you the job of noticing and correcting them, which is more cognitively expensive than if you had just done the task yourself. The dream of the trip that manages itself rests entirely on a foundation that is invisible to the traveler: connected, reliable, well-structured data underneath. Without that, the agent is not removal of the task. It is the task plus a new supervisory burden.

So the agent is not the destination. The agent is one possible mechanism for reaching the destination, and the destination has not changed in twenty years. It was always the same thing. The traveler wants to not think about it.

There is a paradox in building toward this goal, and I have made peace with it only recently. The better this kind of product becomes, the less the user notices it. Success is measured by absence, by the things that did not happen, by the moments of friction that never occurred. A traveler whose trips simply work will not write you a glowing review about the search interface, because they will barely remember using it. The highest compliment this category of software can earn is to be forgotten. You build something that someone uses constantly and thinks about never.

This runs against every instinct that modern product culture has trained into us. We are taught to want engagement, to measure attention, to celebrate the user who opens the app every day. For most software, that is the right ambition. For this software, it is a symptom of failure. Every additional time the traveler has to open the app is a small admission that the trip did not fully take care of itself. The metric we should be proud of is not how often they come back. It is how rarely they need to.

I will admit the limits of this, because pretending they do not exist would undermine the whole argument. There will always be a residue of the trip that requires a human. The flight that collapses at eleven at night and needs a person, somewhere, to untangle it. The judgment call that no rail can encode. The traveler who genuinely needs to weigh two options that are both within policy and both reasonable. The goal is not to eliminate every human moment, which is neither possible nor desirable. The goal is to eliminate the manufactured ones: the friction we created and then learned to tolerate, the tasks that exist only because the systems underneath never talked to each other.

Strip those away, and what remains is small. A few genuine decisions. A human on the other end of the line for the rare moment that needs one. And in between, a long quiet stretch where the trip simply happens and the traveler’s attention stays where it belongs, on the reason they left home in the first place.

So when I look at a new travel product now, I have stopped asking whether the interface is good. Good interfaces are table stakes, and in any case they are answering a question from a previous era. The question I ask instead is the one that made the room uncomfortable at the start: how much of this trip does the traveler still have to think about?

Count the moments honestly. The search. The comparison. The approval wait. The receipt. The reconciliation. The eleven-o’clock rebooking. Each one is a withdrawal from an account the company is paying to fill. The best travel program is not the one that makes those withdrawals feel pleasant. It is the one that quietly closes the account, until the traveler reaches the end of the trip and realizes, almost with surprise, that they never had to think about the travel at all.

That is the bar. Not an app they love to open. A trip they never had to manage.

About me

I am an entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience at the intersection of tourism and technology. I am co-founder and Chief Business Officer of VOLL, the largest mobile-first corporate travel and expense management platform in Latin America, and a recognized reference in the development of the corporate travel industry.

A Marketing specialist from Fundação Dom Cabral, I serve on the Tourism Council of FecomércioSP and on the Executive Council of the Latin American Association of Corporate Events and Travel Management (Alagev). A frequent traveler and close observer of human behavior in motion, I write and speak about innovation, digital transformation, entrepreneurial leadership, and the future of corporate travel.

When a company wants to cut travel costs, it goes after the flight. I understand why. The airfare is the number everyone fixates on, the one that feels like the trip. It is visible, it is negotiated, it is the thing people complain about at dinner. I have spent a good part of my career inside that conversation, and I have written here about the forces that push fares around.

But if you actually open a corporate travel program and look at where the money moves the most unpredictably, the flight is rarely the worst offender. The hotel is.

I think hotels get a pass for a strange reason: they feel simpler than flights. A flight has fare classes, ancillaries, change fees, a whole vocabulary of complexity. A hotel is just a room for a night. How complicated can it be? That instinct is exactly why the hotel line is where so much money leaks out without anyone noticing. It looks simple, so nobody guards it.

The number that gives it away

Here is what changed my mind on this, years ago, and what the recent data keeps confirming.

Flight prices, for all their complexity, move within a fairly narrow band year to year. The forecasts for 2026 put airfare inflation somewhere in the low single digits, two to three percent in most markets, and some analyses even show fares down globally as airlines stimulate demand. Predictable, almost boring.

Hotels are a different animal. Global average daily rates are forecast to rise close to five percent in 2026, but that aggregate hides the real story, which is the spread. One benchmark found the discount gap between market and negotiated hotel rates had widened to over 22 percent, far above the 5 to 10 percent seen a few years ago. And the city-by-city variation is wild. In the same period, Chicago, London, and Toronto saw hotel rates climb 12 to 14 percent, while Scottsdale, Barcelona, and Boston went the other way, with rates falling 4 to 11 percent.

Read that again. In the same window, comparable business destinations moved in opposite directions by double digits. A flight does not do that. A hotel program does it constantly, and most companies never see it, because they are watching the airfare.

Why the leak is so hard to see

The hotel spend hides for reasons that are almost structural.

A flight is one decision, made once, for a round trip. You book São Paulo to New York, and that is mostly that. A hotel is a decision that repeats, every single night, and every night is a new little negotiation against a price that the hotel itself is changing several times a day with its own algorithms. The room that cost one rate on Tuesday is a different rate on Wednesday, because a convention came to town, or did not.

So the leak is not one big hole. It is a thousand tiny ones. A traveler books slightly above the negotiated rate because they did not know there was one. Another books a property with no corporate agreement at all. A third books the right hotel but on the wrong night, the night the city is full because of an event nobody flagged. None of these is a scandal. Each is a few percent. Added across a year and thousands of nights, the few percent become the kind of number that would get someone fired if it showed up as a single line.

I wrote in my last piece about how the largest cost in corporate travel is the one that never appears on an invoice, the cost of time. The hotel leak is its cousin. It is the cost that appears on every invoice, in plain sight, and still nobody sees it, because it is smeared across so many small transactions that no single one looks wrong.

The event problem

There is one pattern here worth pulling out on its own, because it is getting worse, and because I saw it firsthand in the data behind a piece I worked on recently.

Business travel and leisure travel have stopped being separate worlds. They now compete for the same rooms, on the same nights, in the same cities. When a holiday weekend, a major sporting event, and a business calendar collide, the corporate traveler is suddenly bidding against a tourist for the last room, and the tourist often wins, because the tourist booked three months ago and the business trip came up last week.

This is not abstract. 2026 is a year stacked with this kind of collision: a packed calendar of holidays falling on weekdays, the largest sporting event on the planet landing in cities that are also business hubs, and the general churn of demand that follows big events. A company that treats every night as just “a room” walks straight into these spikes without seeing them coming. A company that reads the calendar, that knows which city is about to fill up and why, plans around them and pays a fraction of the price.

The difference between those two companies is not budget. It is visibility. One sees the wave forming. The other gets hit by it and calls it bad luck.

What good hotel management actually looks like

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to turn this into a pitch, and that is not what this newsletter is for. So let me keep it to principles, not products.

Good hotel cost management is not mostly about negotiating harder. Negotiation matters, and TMC-negotiated rates can save in the range of 15 percent against public rates, which is real money. But the negotiation is the easy part. The hard part, the part that actually moves the number, is making sure the negotiated rate is the one that gets booked, on the right night, by a traveler who did not have to think about any of it.

That means the corporate rate has to be in front of the traveler at the moment of booking, not buried in a policy document. It means the system has to know that the city is about to spike and nudge the trip a day earlier or a hotel two blocks over. It means the data from all those nights has to come back in a form a human can actually read, so the company can see the pattern instead of drowning in line items.

None of this is glamorous. It is the unsexy work of connecting decisions that used to be disconnected. But it is where the money is, far more than in the airfare everyone argues about.

The honest caveat

I do not want to oversell the control. Hotels run dynamic pricing for a reason, and they are very good at it. No corporate program is going to outsmart a revenue management algorithm on every night of the year. Some volatility is simply the cost of needing a bed in a busy city on a date you did not choose.

And there is a human limit too. Sometimes the traveler needs the hotel next to the client, not the cheaper one across town, and forcing the cheaper booking to save four percent is a false economy that costs you a tired, annoyed employee. The point is not to squeeze every night. The point is to see the spend clearly enough to know which nights are worth squeezing and which are not.

The question to sit with

So here is what I would ask any company that is about to spend another quarter fighting over airfare.

When was the last time you looked at your hotel spend the way you look at your flights? Not the total, the total tells you nothing. The spread. The variation by city, by night, by how far ahead the booking was made. The gap between the rate you negotiated and the rate your people actually paid.

My guess is that for most companies, that number has never been looked at properly, because the hotel always seemed too simple to bother with. It is not simple. It is just quiet. And quiet is exactly how money leaves a building without anyone hearing the door.

About me

I am an entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience at the intersection of tourism and technology. I am co-founder and Chief Business Officer of VOLL, the largest mobile-first corporate travel and expense management platform in Latin America, and a recognized reference in the development of the corporate travel industry.

A Marketing specialist from Fundação Dom Cabral, I serve on the Tourism Council of FecomércioSP and on the Executive Council of the Latin American Association of Corporate Events and Travel Management (Alagev). A frequent traveler and close observer of human behavior in motion, I write and speak about innovation, digital transformation, entrepreneurial leadership, and the future of corporate travel.

I started my career behind a hotel desk. One of my jobs was to call taxis for guests. A guest would walk up, ask for a car, and I would pull out a paper voucher, fill in the origin and destination by hand, and hand it over. At the end of the month, those slips of paper traveled by mail to the companies that had to read them, tally them, and pay them. A thirty-real cab ride dragged a whole logistics chain behind it.

I think about that desk a lot, because the paper is mostly gone now, but the chain it represented is still here. We just stopped seeing it.

When a company reviews its travel and expense budget, the conversation almost always lands on the same numbers. The airfare. The hotel rate. The car. Those are the line items everyone can point to, the ones that show up in red when the quarter gets tight. They are real, and they matter, and I have written before about how oil prices and airport capacity push them around.

But there is another cost, larger than most companies suspect, that never appears on a single invoice. It is the time. The hours people spend booking, approving, documenting, chasing receipts, reconciling, and explaining. That cost is paid in salaries, not in fares, which is exactly why it hides so well.

The number that should bother every CFO

Here is a figure that stopped me when I read it. According to the Skift and Navan 2026 State of Corporate Travel and Expense survey, 71% of finance and travel professionals spend more than thirty minutes filing each expense report. Thirty minutes. For one report. Multiply that by the number of trips a mid-sized company runs in a year and you are looking at weeks of skilled professional time poured into a task that produces nothing.

And filing is only the visible part. A guide published earlier this year estimated that poor travel management costs organizations between four and eight hours of productive time per trip, once you count the booking friction, the stress, and the reporting burden. Over a third of business travelers, by the same account, lose four to eight hours of working time per trip to the operational mess around it.

Sit with that for a second. The trip exists to create value: a sale closed, a relationship built, a deal signed in person because a video call would not do it. Then the company quietly claws back a full working day of that value through the friction of organizing the trip and accounting for it afterward.

I find that almost poetic, in the worst way. We spend money to put a person in a room with a client, and then we spend that person’s time undoing part of the reason we sent them.

Where the hours actually go

The waste is not in one place. It is scattered across the journey, which is part of why it is so hard to see and so easy to ignore.

It starts before the trip. The employee fills out a request, picks options, waits for approval. The manager reviews, sometimes asks for changes, sends it back. None of this is hard work, but it is slow work, and slow work in a high-frequency process adds up the way a dripping tap fills a bucket.

Then comes the trip itself, where small frictions multiply. A flight changes. A hotel booking needs adjusting. The traveler, who is supposed to be focused on the meeting, becomes a part-time travel agent for their own trip.

And then the part everyone dreads: the expenses. The receipts that pile up in a wallet or a phone gallery. The report that has to be assembled, often days or weeks later, when half the context is already forgotten. One study cited this year found that manual expense report processing costs about 26 dollars per report, against roughly 7 dollars when automated. The gap is not the software license. The gap is human hours.

The finance team inherits the worst of it. When skilled finance professionals spend a third of their time matching transactions by hand, you are paying premium salaries for data entry. At month-end, someone pulls card files from the bank portal, tries to match them against submitted reports, hunts for missing receipts, flags duplicates, and does it across different currencies and cost centers. It is exhausting and it is slow, and it repeats every single month, forever, until something changes.

The part that is not about money

I could keep stacking up numbers, because they are damning. But the cost I care about most is harder to put in a spreadsheet, and I think it is the one that actually decides whether a company’s travel program is healthy or sick.

It is what all this friction does to the person traveling.

When someone has to document every receipt, wait weeks to be reimbursed for money they fronted out of their own pocket, and fight with an unclear policy on top of it, they stop seeing business travel as an opportunity. They start seeing it as a punishment. I have watched good people turn down trips that would have been good for their careers and good for the company, simply because the overhead of going was not worth it to them.

That is the real tax. Not the dollars on the expense report, but the slow erosion of the willingness to go. A company can absorb a high airfare. It cannot easily absorb its best people quietly deciding that travel is more trouble than it is worth.

There is also something a little undignified about asking an employee to lend the company money. Because that is what an out-of-pocket expense is: an interest-free loan from a salaried worker to their employer, repaid late, after paperwork. We have normalized it to the point that nobody questions it. But it is strange, when you stop and look at it.

Why the friction survives

If this cost is so large, why does it persist? I have thought about this a lot, and I think the answer is uncomfortable.

It survives precisely because it is invisible. The airfare has an owner: someone negotiates it, someone reports on it, someone gets praised for bringing it down. The lost hours have no owner. They are spread so thin across so many people that no single person feels them as a line they are responsible for. The traveler loses an hour. The manager loses twenty minutes. The finance analyst loses an afternoon at month-end. Nobody adds it up, so nobody fights it.

The second reason is that, for years, the only alternative to the manual process was a different manual process. You could move the friction around, from the traveler to an agency, from paper to a slightly less painful spreadsheet, but you could not make it disappear. So companies made peace with it. It became the cost of doing business, the weather, something you complain about but do not expect to change.

That second reason is the one that no longer holds. And that is what makes this an interesting moment rather than just a depressing one.

What changes when the data connects

The reason the friction was permanent is that the information lived in silos. The booking lived in one system. The card transaction lived in the bank’s portal. The receipt lived in someone’s pocket. The policy lived in a PDF nobody read. Every handoff between those silos was a place where a human had to step in, copy something, check something, fix something.

When those things connect, the human steps out of the loop for the parts that never needed a human in the first place. The receipt matches the transaction automatically. The policy check happens at the moment of booking, not three weeks later in an audit. The report mostly writes itself, because the data was captured as the spending happened rather than reconstructed from memory afterward.

The numbers on what this recovers are large enough that I was skeptical at first. Various finance teams report cutting reconciliation time by figures in the range of 70 to 90 percent once the matching is automated. One analysis estimated that a company processing a thousand expense reports a month could save around 160 hours of manual work, roughly one full-time person. I do not put full faith in any single vendor’s statistic, and neither should you. But even if the real numbers are half of what is claimed, the direction is unmistakable.

And here is the part that matters more than the time saved. When finance stops spending its month-end just surviving, it starts doing the work it was actually hired for: analyzing where the money goes, spotting the patterns, finding the savings that no manual process would ever surface. The hours reclaimed do not just make the close faster. They change what the finance team is for.

The question worth asking

I am not going to pretend technology erases every friction. It does not, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. There will always be the flight that gets cancelled at 11pm and the human who needs to fix it. Some of the journey will always need a person, and I have argued before that the companies who forget this lose something important.

But the manual, repetitive, soul-draining part of travel and expense, the part that produces nothing and costs a fortune in hours, does not have to survive into this decade. It survived because we could not see it and because we had no alternative. Both of those things have changed.

So the question I would put to anyone running a travel program in 2026 is not the one they usually ask. It is not “how do we cut the airfare.” It is the quieter one, the one that never shows up on the expense report.

How many hours is your company spending to manage the money it spends?

Add it up honestly. The number tends to be larger than anyone expects. And once you have seen it, the way I still see that desk full of paper vouchers, you cannot unsee it.

About me

I am an entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience at the intersection of tourism and technology. I am co-founder and Chief Business Officer of VOLL, the largest mobile-first corporate travel and expense management platform in Latin America, and a recognized reference in the development of the corporate travel industry.

A Marketing specialist from Fundação Dom Cabral, I serve on the Tourism Council of FecomércioSP and on the Executive Council of the Latin American Association of Corporate Events and Travel Management (Alagev). A frequent traveler and close observer of human behavior in motion, I write and speak about innovation, digital transformation, entrepreneurial leadership, and the future of corporate travel.