Smart travel, strong ROI: How to build a profitable business travel culture

Business travel has returned as an important part of how organisations connect, collaborate, and grow. Employees can use travel to build relationships, develop skills, and gain exposure to new markets and ways of working. For businesses, face-to-face engagement can support client relationships, collaboration across distributed teams, and commercial opportunities.

Yet, the value of travel doesn't remove the pressure to control its cost.

Finance leaders are being asked to maintain financial discipline while supporting long-term growth, often against an uncertain economic backdrop. That pressure can put travel budgets under scrutiny, despite 97 per cent of CFOs reporting that business travel is important to their growth strategy.

This creates an important question for leadership teams: how can organisations get greater value from business travel without letting costs run ahead of outcomes?

While simply cutting travel can deliver immediate savings, looking at travel only as a cost risks overlooking its broader business value. Market knowledge, stronger working relationships, employee development, and opportunities to engage customers and prospects can all depend on bringing people together at the right time.

"The goal should therefore be neither more travel nor less travel. It should be better travel: trips with a clear purpose, appropriate controls, and an outcome that justifies the investment."

There are three areas leaders should consider.

1. Identify high-value travel and cut low-value spend

Not every business trip delivers the same value. Organisations need to understand why people are travelling, what the business expects to gain, and whether the investment is proportionate to the outcome.

This starts with visibility. Travel and expense (T&E) data can help leaders identify patterns in travel behaviour, examine unnecessary spending, and make more informed decisions about where budgets should be directed.

Each trip should also connect to a clear business objective. One way to approach this is to distinguish between operational travel, such as inspecting a new supply chain partner or delivering training, and strategic travel, such as negotiating an acquisition or meeting a prospective client.

The most valuable trips can also be those that give colleagues with limited face time an opportunity to work together on a tangible business issue.
For finance leaders, this is where better T&E visibility becomes important. Understanding where money is being spent and connecting that spend with business objectives can help organisations make more deliberate decisions about which trips to support, where to tighten controls, and where investment may deliver greater value.
 
2. Give employees a voice in travel decisions

Travel policies are often shaped by leaders across finance, HR, procurement, and travel management. Those functions bring important perspectives on cost, risk, compliance, and workforce needs. However, policies designed entirely from the top can miss what matters to the employees who use them.

Organisations can address this by creating structured ways for employees at different career stages to contribute to travel policy.

One option is a small advisory group or 'next-generation board' that gives leaders fresh perspectives, constructive challenges, and feedback. This can help leaders understand how policies work in practice while giving employees greater insight into why particular controls exist.

A policy may make sense financially but still create unnecessary friction for employees. Equally, employees may value travel opportunities that leaders have underestimated, particularly when those trips contribute to professional development, collaboration, or exposure to different markets.

Employee experience and compliance are closely connected. Complex or disjointed processes can make it harder for employees to follow policy and reduce the quality of the data available to finance teams. The strongest travel cultures combine financial oversight with employee input. The objective is to design controls that people can understand and follow.
 
3. Model good travel from the top

Leadership behaviour can be as important as written policy.

Business travel creates opportunities for employees to observe experienced leaders, visit new markets, and collaborate with colleagues from different backgrounds.

However, the value of those opportunities can quickly be undermined if travel is treated as an entitlement rather than a business investment.

Executives will struggle to encourage disciplined travel behaviour if they don't demonstrate it themselves.

Leaders can set the standard by travelling with a clear purpose, making sensible spending decisions, and sharing what resulted from important trips. This can include new customer opportunities, stronger internal relationships, lessons from a market, or efficiencies identified through face-to-face collaboration.

Jonathan Beeby said, "Travel culture is shaped as much by what leaders do as by what policies say. When executives are purposeful about why they travel, disciplined about what they spend, and clear about the value a trip delivers, employees have a practical model for making the same decisions."

Good leadership also depends on having the right information. Leaders need visibility across bookings and expenses to understand whether travel policies are working and where money is going. Connected T&E processes can help organisations reduce manual work, strengthen policy compliance, and give finance leaders a clearer picture of spending.

Treat travel as an investment that needs managing

The debate about business travel goes beyond whether organisations should spend more or less. The more important question is whether each investment in travel supports a meaningful business outcome.

For finance leaders, that means combining cost discipline with a clear understanding of value. For employees, it means having policies and processes that make purposeful travel easier while setting clear expectations. And, for leadership teams, it means demonstrating the same discipline they expect across the organisation.
Organisations that prioritise high-value engagements, involve employees in policy decisions, and model responsible travel from the top can build a travel culture that supports both financial control and business growth.

Business travel will always have a cost. The opportunity is to make that cost intentional, visible, and connected to value.