Here is the objection I expect before I finish this sentence: another travel executive complaining that the industry needs better technology, conveniently sold by someone who sells travel technology. That is not the argument I am making, and I would rather name the conflict now than have you discover it three paragraphs in.
I co-founded VOLL, a corporate travel and expense management platform, so I have a stake in how this problem gets described. Read the rest with that in mind.
The actual argument is narrower and less convenient for me than “buy a better tool.” Corporate travel programs do not have a technology problem.
They have a data problem, and most of the technology bought in the last five years made that data problem worse, not better, because every new system added one more place where information about the same trip gets stored, formatted and never reconciled with the others.
Only 12 percent of global travel programs see their own data in one place
Start with the number that should worry any travel manager more than any single vendor comparison. A survey of 269 corporate travel buyers across the United States, Canada and Europe, conducted in March 2026 by GBTA in partnership with Spotnana, Marriott International and Direct Travel, found that only 12% of global buyers have a consolidated view of their travel program from a single data source.
Sixty one percent said managing travel across regions was itself a challenge, and the top complaints were a lack of consolidated reporting, cited by 63%, inconsistent traveler support, cited by 60%, and the burden of managing multiple travel management company relationships, cited by 52%, according to GBTA’s own release of the findings.
Read the sponsor list again before taking the number at face value. Spotnana and Direct Travel sell the exact platforms that promise to solve fragmentation, and Marriott has an obvious interest in travel programs adopting technology that surfaces its own inventory more favorably. That does not make the 12% wrong.
Coverage of the same survey from The Business Travel Magazine and from Hospitality Net both carried the figure without dispute, and it lines up with what anyone running a multi-country program already suspects about their own reporting. Take the number, discard the framing that a single new platform closes the gap, and keep reading.
A better booking tool was never the whole test
The instinct, once fragmentation is named, is to point at the booking tool. That instinct is also measured, and it also comes up short.
Christopherson Business Travel, a travel management company, surveyed 123 U.S. travel management, procurement, operations and finance professionals in August 2026 for a white paper called The Booking Breakpoint.
Only 20% of respondents said their current booking tools support their organization’s travel needs “very effectively.”
The gaps concentrated exactly where a program needs a tool the most: only 11% said more than three quarters of trip modifications get handled successfully through self-service, and during actual disruptions, only 10% said their tools supported travelers very effectively, as the company reported in its own release.
Disclose the interest here too, because the skill I hold myself to when I write about a competitor’s research applies just as hard to my own industry. Christopherson sells Andavo Booking, a tool built explicitly to solve the problem this survey describes. A vendor measuring the gap its own product fills is not disqualifying, it is completely ordinary in this sector, and it is also a reason to read the number as directionally true rather than precisely calibrated.
The pattern across two independently sponsored surveys, one built around platform consolidation and one built around a specific booking tool, pointing at the same underlying failure, is harder to wave away than either number alone.
The habit I only found because I looked at my own data
I used to book Monday morning flights without thinking about it, the same way most business travelers do, because Monday morning is when the week’s meetings start. Then I looked at what my own trips actually cost by day of week and found that flying Monday morning was running 59.4% more expensive than flying the same route Tuesday through Thursday. I changed my own booking habit because of a number I had to go find myself, not because any tool surfaced it to me.
That is the part the 12% figure actually describes. It is not that travel managers lack dashboards. Most programs have several. It is that no single one of those dashboards holds the full trip, air, hotel, ground transport, meals and the exceptions layered on top, in a shape that lets a pattern like mine show up without someone deciding to go looking for it.
A consolidated data source is not a nicer report. It is the difference between a habit you catch and a habit you never notice you have.
Leaving the managed channel is two exposures, not one
Fragmentation inside the approved stack is one failure mode. What happens when travelers give up on that stack and route around it entirely is a second one, and the two compound.
A Forrester Consulting study commissioned by Perk, a travel and expense platform vendor, surveyed business travelers on what it calls shadow work, the administrative tasks that pile up around a trip outside any single system.
Sixty seven percent of respondents named booking travel, filing expenses, managing invoices and organizing team events as the most frustrating category of that work, it takes an average of 11 minutes to refocus after finishing one of those tasks, and only 7% said their company’s tech stack was well integrated.
Employees using six or more separate tools were significantly more likely to describe their systems as complex and ineffective, according to the study, released in September 2025. Perk sells app consolidation, so read the framing with the same skepticism applied above, and keep the underlying pattern.
That pattern has a security layer most travel managers underweight. When a traveler abandons a slow or rigid approved tool for a consumer app that loads faster or takes a preferred payment method, the itinerary and the personal data inside it now live somewhere the company cannot see, audit or protect.
TechRadar’s reporting on what it calls the shadow IT crisis in travel lays out the mechanism plainly: unapproved receipt-scanning apps can upload images containing personal information to third-party servers, AI tools built on scraped data can return outdated fares or availability, and a booking made outside the managed channel is invisible to whatever duty of care system the company relies on if that traveler needs help during a disruption.
Put the two studies together and the exposure is not one problem, it is two riding on the same trip. Leaving the managed channel is a data quality problem, because the trip disappears from every consolidated report a program is trying to build, and it is a data security problem, at the same time, because the itinerary and the personal information inside it now sit in a system nobody vetted.
Most conversations about shadow IT in travel treat it as an inconvenience. It is closer to a program losing visibility into a piece of itself while simultaneously losing control over where an employee’s data lives.
A live example of the same failure, one category at a time
Meals are the easiest place to watch this happen in real time, because almost no program manages them the way it manages air and hotel.
Navan added restaurant discovery and booking to its Navan Edge AI concierge through a partnership with OpenTable, using live location and itinerary data to learn a traveler’s cuisine preferences and dietary restrictions and to prompt a reservation before nearby restaurants fill up. Group dining, private rooms and automatic adjustments when a flight or a meeting shifts are part of the roadmap, as Business Travel News reported in August 2026.
Edge itself launched earlier in the year as an assistant open to any traveler, managed or not, built on Navan’s own data rather than the company’s approved channel alone.
Notice what that means for a program’s data. Meals already sit outside most travel management systems entirely, reconciled later through expense reports if they are captured at all, even though VOLL’s own analysis of corporate card spend found that most of it happens between lunch and dinner, with restaurants as the single largest merchant category.
An assistant that helps a traveler book a table faster is a genuine convenience. An assistant open to travelers who are not managed at all, learning their preferences on infrastructure the program itself cannot see, is also a textbook shadow channel, arriving with a friendlier interface than the ones the earlier studies described. The two are not in tension. A tool can make the traveler’s day easier and make the program’s data problem worse in the same transaction.
None of this research has looked south yet
Every figure in this article comes from a study built on North American or European samples. GBTA’s survey covered the United States, Canada and Europe. Christopherson’s respondents were entirely U.S. based. Perk’s shadow work research does not break out Latin America either.
That is not a footnote, it is the most important gap in the whole picture. A region running its programs across more currencies, more regulatory regimes per unit of geography, and a smaller base of local enterprise travel technology than the markets these surveys measured is, if anything, more exposed to both failure modes described above, not less.
Nobody has published the number that would tell a São Paulo or Bogotá based travel manager how their fragmentation compares to what GBTA found in North America and Europe, and the absence of that number is itself worth noticing.
The region is not behind on this problem. It is simply the part of the map nobody has measured yet.
What to check instead of what to buy
None of the four numbers in this article point at a specific product, including mine. They point at three questions any travel manager can answer about their own program this week, without procuring anything.
The first is whether one person in the organization can pull air, hotel, ground transport and expense data for a single trip without opening more than one system. If that takes more than one login, the program does not have a consolidated view, regardless of what any individual tool’s marketing claims.
The second is how the program currently finds out when a traveler books outside the approved channel. If the honest answer is “we don’t, until the expense report shows up,” the program has no visibility into its own shadow spend, which means every number in its official reporting understates real travel activity by an unknown margin.
The third is whether anyone has actually measured, the way I measured my own Monday mornings, what pattern is hiding in the program’s existing data right now. Most programs have never asked, because the data lives in enough separate places that asking feels like a project rather than a query.
VOLL was built around the belief that these three questions matter more than which specific booking engine a company chooses, which is the declared interest I opened with and the reason I am the wrong person to trust blindly on this topic. Trust the numbers instead. Three separately sponsored, separately motivated studies, from a global buyer association, a travel management company and an expense platform vendor, converged on the same underlying finding from three different angles. That kind of agreement across competing commercial interests is rarer than any single statistic, and it is usually worth believing.
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.