What the world gets wrong about the Latin America corporate travel market
Small share, slow forecast, and a market that has not finished being measured.
I have spent most of my career building corporate travel infrastructure in a region that, by the industry’s own accounting, represents 3.6 percent of what the world spends on business travel.
That number sits in the Global Business Travel Association’s annual index, the study that tries to measure every dollar spent on business travel anywhere on earth. When the regional distribution goes up on the screen at the convention, Asia Pacific takes 40 percent, North America 27, Europe 27. Then there is a thin slice at the bottom, and that slice is everything from Mexico City to Buenos Aires.
If you run a global travel program, that slide is probably the entire mental model you carry about this region. Small share, slow growth, deal with it later.
I want to argue that the slide is accurate and the mental model is wrong, and that the gap between those two things is where the interesting part of this market lives.
What the index actually measures
Start with the instrument, because its design explains a lot.
The GBTA index runs on 25 years of data across 72 country markets and 44 industries, built to capture managed and unmanaged spend alike: the corporate card and the personal card, the overnight trip and the day trip, domestic and international. The most recent edition put global business travel spending at a record 1.47 trillion dollars in 2024, and projected 1.57 trillion for 2025, a growth rate of about 6.6 percent, with a rebound to 8.1 percent expected the following year. The two-trillion-dollar mark, which the industry once expected to cross in 2028, moved out to 2029.
Two design choices matter for anyone reading the regional slice. The first is that it is an origin view. Spending is attributed to the market where the trip started, not where it landed. A trip from Frankfurt to São Paulo counts as European spending. The second is that everything is converted to US dollars, which makes comparison possible and makes currency movement part of the story whether you want it to be or not.
There is also a detail in the numbers that almost nobody quotes, and it reframes the whole recovery narrative. Adjusted for inflation, global business travel spending has not recovered at all. Real spending remains meaningfully below where it stood in 2019. The industry crossed its old record in dollars, not in trips. We are spending more to travel less.
Where Latin America actually sits
Here is the part that surprised me when I first heard it said plainly.
Latin America recovered faster than almost anywhere. The region climbed back to roughly 110 percent of its pre-pandemic business travel spending, ahead of the global average, ahead of Europe, ahead of Asia Pacific. On the recovery chart, this is not a laggard region. It is one of the fastest to come back.
And then the forecast turns, hard. Over the next five years, Latin America is expected to grow more slowly than the world, and to rank among the slowest growing regions measured. The reasons given are structural rather than cyclical: a persistent competitiveness gap, high tax burdens, and long-running economic frictions that no travel cycle is going to fix.
I do not think that diagnosis is wrong. I have watched every one of those frictions show up in a client conversation. What I think is that the diagnosis is incomplete in a specific way, and the incompleteness matters most to exactly the people reading the forecast.
What a spend forecast cannot see
A spending forecast measures dollars. In a mature market, dollars are a good proxy for activity, because nearly all activity is captured. In a market like this one, that proxy breaks down in at least three places.
The first is penetration. Latin America is not a market where corporate travel has saturated and is now growing at the pace of GDP. It is a market where a large share of business travel still happens outside any managed program at all: booked directly, paid on a personal card, reimbursed through an expense report, invisible to procurement and largely invisible to measurement. When that travel migrates into a managed program, no new trip is created, but a great deal of previously uncounted spending becomes visible. The growth that matters most to a travel technology company here is not the growth of the market. It is the conversion of the informal into the formal.
The second is that structural friction cuts both ways. High tax burdens, complex compliance regimes, and fragmented supplier landscapes do suppress growth, exactly as the forecast says. They also make professional travel management far more valuable per dollar managed than it is in a simpler market. In a country where the rules are easy, a travel program saves money. In a country where the rules are hard, a travel program is the difference between operating and not operating. Global companies routinely discover this six months after entering the region, usually the expensive way.
The third is that the aggregate hides enormous internal variance. Latin America on a chart is a single bar. On the ground it is a set of markets with different currencies, different aviation structures, different labor and tax regimes, and different corporate cultures. Treating them as one unit is roughly as useful as treating Europe as one unit, which is to say useful for a slide and misleading for a decision.
The Brazilian layers underneath
Brazil is the largest piece of that regional bar, and it carries two structural features that I have written about separately because each deserves its own examination.
The first is a legal environment unlike anywhere else, in which the country concentrates the overwhelming majority of the world’s airline lawsuits while flying a small fraction of the world’s passengers. That litigation cost presses on margins that are already among the thinnest in any industry, and it quietly shapes which routes exist and at what price.
The second is what I have called the full-airport paradox: terminals operating at extraordinary density, a market large enough to rank among the world’s biggest by spend, and a country that still sits well outside the global top ten by passengers, because so much of the population does not fly at all and because the world routes around the region rather than through it.
Neither of those facts appears in a spending forecast. Both of them determine what a corporate travel program in this region can and cannot do.
What this means if you manage a global program
If Latin America is a line item in a program you run from New York or London, three practical implications follow from all of this.
Do not size the region by its share of spend. Size it by the share of your people and your revenue that depend on it. Those two numbers are frequently very different, and the second one is the one that will cost you when something goes wrong at two in the morning in a market you never studied.
Expect the value of management to be higher here, not lower. The friction that suppresses the growth forecast is the same friction that makes an unmanaged program expensive. Regions that are hard to operate in are precisely the regions where operating well is worth the most.
And treat visibility as the first objective, not savings. In a market with this much unmanaged travel, the first year of a serious program does not usually produce a dramatic savings number. It produces something more valuable and less flattering: an accurate picture of what the company was already spending.
The thin slice, reconsidered
So I keep coming back to that slide.
Three point six percent is a real number, honestly measured, and I have no quarrel with it. But a share of global spend is a description of the present, and the forecast built on top of it describes a continuation of the present. Neither describes a region where a large share of business travel has not yet been counted, where the difficulty of operating is the strongest argument for managing well, and where the aggregate conceals more than it reveals.
The world looks at that slice and sees a small market growing slowly. From inside it, what I see is a market that has not finished being measured.
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.