The best data in this industry admits it cannot see my region
The industry's best data barely sees my region. That gap is the whole point.
There is a sentence buried in the methodology of the industry’s most important research that I think is more revealing than any headline number the research produces.
The GBTA Business Travel Index is the most comprehensive measure of business travel spending in the world. It runs on decades of data across dozens of country markets and industries, and when it speaks, the entire industry listens, including me. I have quoted it repeatedly. I trust it. And precisely because I trust it, I want to take seriously something it says about itself: that its data is richest for the United States and Western Europe, and thinner elsewhere. That supplier data does not always cleanly separate the business traveler from the leisure traveler. That in large parts of the world, the picture is estimated more than it is observed.
That is not a criticism of the study. It is an unusually honest disclosure by a serious research organization, and I respect it enormously. But it has a consequence that almost nobody discusses, and the consequence is the entire reason this newsletter exists.
What it means to be estimated rather than observed
Think about what that methodological note actually implies for a region like Latin America.
In a market with deep, clean data, the number the index reports is close to a measurement. It reflects what was actually spent, captured through well-developed reporting systems, corporate cards, managed programs, and mature supplier data. The forecast is an informed projection built on a solid floor of observed fact.
In a market where the data is thin, the number is closer to an estimate built on a model. And the model, necessarily, is calibrated on the markets where the data is rich, which means it carries the assumptions of those markets into a region that does not share them. A model trained on how the United States and Western Europe behave will describe Latin America as a version of those places, scaled down. But this region is not a smaller version of those places. It is a structurally different market, and the ways it differs are exactly the ways a model built elsewhere is least equipped to see.
When your data is thin, you do not see a region as it is. You see a region as your model assumes it should be. And the gap between those two things is largest precisely where the reality is most distinctive.
The specific things a thin dataset misses here
Let me be concrete about what falls into that blind spot, because vagueness helps no one.
It misses the enormous volume of unmanaged travel I have written about, the trips booked on personal cards and reimbursed through spreadsheets, which by definition do not flow through the managed channels and supplier feeds that global data relies on. A region that manages only half its travel is a region where a large share of activity is structurally invisible to the very instruments that measure it.
It misses the informal-to-formal conversion that is the real growth story here, because an instrument calibrated on mature markets is looking for the kind of growth mature markets have, incremental expansion of already-measured activity, not the sudden illumination of activity that was always happening but never counted.
It misses the structural texture. The specific weight of airfare in the cost of a trip. The particular way a fuel shock transmits through a market with no rail alternative. The currency dynamics that make a dollar-denominated number mean something completely different on the ground. These are not details a global model gets slightly wrong. They are the defining features of the market, and they are the first casualties of estimation.
The number that proves the point
Here is the piece of evidence I find most persuasive, and it comes from comparing two sources that should agree and do not.
The GBTA index estimates Brazil’s business travel market at 35.8 billion dollars. Meanwhile, Abracorp, the Brazilian corporate travel association, measures the actual intermediated volume flowing through its member agencies, and that figure, converted to dollars, is a small fraction of the GBTA number.
Now, these two numbers are measuring different things, and I want to be careful and fair about that, because the naive version of this comparison is wrong. The GBTA figure is total business travel spend, including everything unmanaged and direct. The Abracorp figure is only the volume intermediated through its members. They are not supposed to be equal. The gap between them is not an error.
But the gap is the point. That enormous space between total estimated spend and actually intermediated volume is the unmanaged, uncounted, informal market, rendered as a number for once. It is the size of the blind spot, made briefly visible by the disagreement between two honest sources measuring from opposite ends. Most regions do not have a gap that large, because most of their travel flows through channels that see it. Ours does, and the size of that gap is the truest single description of this market I know.
I want to add one honest caveat, because rigor demands it. Comparing these figures requires fixing an exchange rate and being explicit that the scopes differ, and anyone who quotes the comparison without those two caveats is misusing it. But done carefully, the comparison illuminates exactly what the global data admits it cannot fully see.
Why I write from here
This is, in the end, why The Moving Biz exists, and why it is written in English from São Paulo rather than in Portuguese for a local audience.
The best data in this industry is honest about its own blind spot. But a blind spot that everyone acknowledges and no one fills stays empty. The global reader gets a number for Latin America that is real, carefully produced, and structurally incomplete, and unless someone who lives inside the region translates what the number is missing, the incompleteness travels silently into every strategy, every investment decision, and every global program built on top of it.
I am not trying to correct the index. I am trying to annotate it. To stand at the edge of the blind spot and describe what I can see from inside it that the instrument, by its own admission, cannot. The data says here is our best estimate of Latin America, and it is genuinely the best. My job is to add the sentence that comes next: here is what that estimate cannot show you, and here is why it matters.
The honest number and the missing sentence
So I will keep quoting the GBTA index, because it is the best thing we have, and I will keep trusting it, because it earns that trust, including by being candid about its own limits.
But I will also keep insisting on the sentence the data cannot write about itself. A region that is estimated rather than observed is not a smaller version of the regions that are observed. It is a different market wearing a borrowed model, and the distance between the borrowed model and the real thing is the most interesting territory in this entire industry.
That distance is my beat. The blind spot is not a problem to me. It is the whole reason to write.
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.