There is no such thing as the average business traveler
Corporate travel programs are designed for a person who doesn't exist, and everyone who actually travels pays for the fiction.
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.