Boarding Call 🚀

We see four significant shifts for 2025: budgets are rising 📈, booking windows are shrinking ⏱️, AI is becoming practical 🤖, and sustainability is moving from presentations to systems 🌿. Here is the quick tour and what to do about it.

Smart Travel 2025

The 10 trends to watch

1. Budgets as a growth lever 💰

   Leaders link travel to revenue, not just cost control.

2. More trips, planned later ⌛✈️

   Inside-7-day bookings keep growing, so volatility rises.

3. Costs concentrate in key hubs 🏙️

   NYC, DC, San Francisco, Zurich, and Geneva lead the “expensive list.”

4. Mobile is the default 📱

   Travelers expect to search, book, change, and expense on a phone.

5. Events and group travel rebound 🎤👥

   Conferences and off-sites drive blocks, name changes, and risk.

6. Purposeful trips beat quick hops 🎯

   Fewer day trips, more focused multi-day visits with clear outcomes.

7. Bleisure keeps rising 🧳🏖️

   Policies often lag on coverage and cost splits for personal days.

8. Younger travelers set expectations 🧑‍💼🌟

   Self-booking, wellness, and flexibility are baseline.

9. Sustainability gets practical 🌿🚆

   Rail on short routes, nonstop when emissions are lower, vetted hotel partners.

10. Humans still matter 🙋‍♀️🆘

    AI accelerates routine tasks, but disruptions still require human agents.

What innovative programs are doing now

• Reprice hotels by city tier and secure flexible, last-minute-friendly rates for high-cost metros.

• Design for short notice with inside-7-day approval rules, downgrade logic, and pre-cleared alternates.

• Make mobile the primary workflow, from search to change to expense.

• Use AI where it pays off, such as in policy checks, duplicate detection, invoice-to-PNR matching, and best-fare suggestions.

• Clarify bleisure guardrails on insurance, cost split, and weekend extensions.

• Integrate sustainability into the booking path, extending beyond PDF policies.

3 quick wins this quarter

• Add a “late-booking play” feature: automatically approve trips under a set budget when booked within 7 days.

• Ship a 1-page green policy with three measurable rules that your tool can enforce.

• Enable AI reconciliation for invoices and traveler receipts to eliminate manual checks.

Free 🔎 30-minute audit of last-minute spend for Insider readers: Reply “Policy” to get the toolkit

If you would like this analysis tailored to your routes, traveler profile, and supplier mix, just hit reply. We will run your data through our models and share a simple plan to lower costs without hurting traveler experience.

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