The corporate travel ROI problem is an information problem
Everyone agrees business travel should prove its return. Almost nobody notices that the function asked to prove it only ever receives half of what it would need.
It is late July, which means the year is more than half gone, and somewhere in most companies a version of the same conversation is starting.
Finance pulls the travel line. It is above plan, or it is below plan, and either way somebody wants to know what the company got for it. The travel manager is asked to demonstrate return on investment. And what happens next is so routine that the industry has stopped noticing how strange it is.
The travel manager produces cost data. Average ticket price, hotel rate, compliance rate, savings against a benchmark, spend by department. All of it accurate. None of it an answer to the question that was asked.
I have watched this play out for years, from both sides of the table, and I have come to think the failure is not analytical. It is structural. Travel programs are asked to prove a return using an information set that, by design, contains only one half of the equation.
Why the question is unanswerable as usually posed
Return on investment requires two numbers. What you put in, and what you got back.
The travel function owns the first number completely. Every dollar of it, down to the change fee. That data is clean, timely, and auditable, and travel teams have gotten very good at producing it.
The second number lives somewhere else entirely. It lives with the sales leader who closed the account, the engineer who fixed the plant, the partner who kept the client, the recruiter who landed the hire. It lives in CRM systems, in project outcomes, in retention numbers, in decisions that happened in a room the travel manager was not in.
So the travel program is asked to calculate a ratio when it holds the numerator and someone else holds the denominator. Under those conditions the only honest answer is a cost report, which is precisely what gets produced, and which then gets read as evidence that travel cannot demonstrate its value. The conclusion follows from the missing data, not from the reality.
What the industry data actually shows
Two figures make the gap concrete, and they sit uncomfortably next to each other.
The first comes out of the Global Business Travel Association’s annual index. Global business travel spending set a nominal record, passing 1.47 trillion dollars in 2024, with a projection above 1.57 trillion for 2025. But adjusted for inflation, real spending remains roughly 14 percent below where it stood in 2019. Strip out price and the picture inverts. The industry is spending more money on fewer trips.
The second comes from the traveler survey inside the same study, covering more than 7,300 business travelers across 33 countries. Around 86 percent of them rate their trips as worthwhile.
Sit with those two facts together. The people who actually take the trips overwhelmingly believe the trips are worth taking. The financial reporting shows rising cost against shrinking volume. Both readings are correct, and they are describing different things: one is measuring outcome as experienced, the other is measuring input as recorded. The disagreement between them is not a data-quality problem. It is the information gap, showing up as a number.
Why cost per trip is a trap
The metric most programs fall back on makes the problem worse rather than better.
Cost per trip is a ratio of input to input. It tells you how efficiently you purchased something without telling you whether you should have purchased it. A program can drive cost per trip down for three consecutive years by pushing people onto worse itineraries for meetings that should never have happened, and every number on the report will improve.
Meanwhile the trip that saved a nine-figure account, booked late, in a premium cabin, at a terrible fare, is the single worst line in that same report.
Any metric that punishes the best trip in the portfolio is not measuring return. It is measuring procurement discipline, which is a real and valuable thing, and which is not the same thing at all.
The fix is a two-way street
If the problem is that the outcome data lives with the business, then the fix is not a better travel report. It is a flow of information in the other direction, and it has to start before the trip, not after.
In practice that means the booking moment becomes the collection moment. At the point of request, the traveler answers a question they can actually answer: what is this trip for. Not a free-text field nobody reads, but a short, structured choice. Closing or expanding a specific account. Retaining a client at risk. Solving an operational problem on site. Recruiting or onboarding. Internal alignment. Training or conference.
That single field changes what is possible downstream. It lets you group spend by business purpose instead of by department, which is the first time the travel data can be joined to anything the business actually tracks. It lets you go to a sales leader with the trips tied to their pipeline and ask them, not finance, whether those trips worked. And it lets you separate the categories that are genuinely hard to justify from the ones that are easy, instead of defending the whole portfolio at the same level of evidence.
None of this requires new technology in any serious sense. It requires the travel function to stop accepting the terms of a question it cannot answer, and to go get the other half of the information.
What to ask the business, and when
The conversation that makes this work does not happen in the annual budget review. It happens at the start of the cycle, and it is short.
Ask each business leader what outcomes they will be measured on this year, and which of those outcomes require someone to be physically present. Ask them what they would do if the travel budget for their team were reduced by a fifth, and which trips they would protect. The trips they protect are the ones with real return, and they will tell you without hesitation, because they already know.
Then agree, in advance, on how the outcome will be reported back. Not by the travel team going to hunt for it in six months, but by the business owning that half of the number the way travel owns its half.
Programs that do this stop having the ROI argument. Not because they win it, but because the question changes from prove your value to which of these categories should grow and which should shrink, which is a conversation worth having and one the data can actually support.
Half a year left
So it is late July, and there is still a full budget cycle ahead.
The travel programs that will be in trouble in December are the ones that spend the next five months producing better and better cost reports in response to a question about value. The ones that will be fine are the ones that spend the next five weeks getting the other half of the information into the building.
The industry keeps describing this as a measurement problem, and I understand why. But measurement is the symptom. The travel function has been asked, for as long as I have been in this business, to prove something using an information set that was never built to prove it. That is not a failure of analysis. It is a failure to notice what is missing.
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.