Travel and Expense
Business Travel’s Trust Problem: 4 Lessons for Travel Leaders
Business travel policy can look clear on paper. But what happens when those policies meet the realities of how people actually travel, make decisions, and use new technology?
Travel policies are designed to create consistency, manage costs, protect employees, and help organizations operate responsibly. But policies aren’t experienced on paper. They’re experienced by people. And when travelers don’t understand why a rule exists, travel managers lack the information they need to demonstrate value, or leaders respond to uncertainty by simply adding more controls; even a well-intentioned program can create friction.
In this episode of SAP Concur Conversations, Jeanne Dion, Global Vice President of Customer Advisory at SAP Concur, sits down with Sara Sarwar, Strategist at alan. agency, to discuss the findings behind the eighth annual SAP Concur Global Business Travel Survey and what the research reveals about trust across today’s travel programs.
Drawing on the perspectives of approximately 3,300 business travelers, 800 travel managers, and 700 CFOs, their conversation goes beyond the numbers to examine what gaps in perception reveal about communication, culture, governance, and the employee experience.
One theme rises above the rest: the human side of business travel matters. Fear, frustration, uncertainty, and trust can all shape how people respond to policies, technology, and organizational expectations, and stronger travel programs may depend less on adding more rules than on understanding why people behave the way they do.
Here are four key takeaways from the SAP Concur Conversation podcast:
1. You can enforce a policy, but you can’t enforce trust.
When uncertainty increases, the instinct to add more controls can be understandable. But more enforcement doesn’t automatically lead to better compliance.
The survey found that 48% of business travelers have bent or broken travel policy, yet the conversation revealed an important nuance: travelers aren’t necessarily ignoring policy simply because they don’t care about the rules.
Their reasons can be far more practical—from making choices they believe are reasonable while on the road to interpreting a policy as flexible enough to accommodate a particular situation. And tightening the rules may not solve the problem. The research found relatively little difference in policy-breaking behavior between travelers in mandated and non-mandated programs.
“It’s very easy when things are a little bit out of your hands… to exert more control. But if anything, we’re seeing that that’s not working.”
— Sara Sarwar
That makes understanding the context behind the question why particularly important. If we look at it from a business traveler’s perspective, controls without a deeper reasoning can create frustration, while controls paired with a clear explanation can help employees understand what an organization is trying to accomplish.
Providing more detail around this lens can be especially important around traveler safety. Location information, for example, can feel like surveillance if employees don’t understand why it is being collected. But its purpose can look very different when employees understand that the same information could help an organization locate and assist them during an emergency.
“It’s not just putting policies there and expecting them to follow it. It’s about explaining the context behind that policy.”
— Sara Sarwar
As Jeanne summarized during the conversation, organizations need to put the human—or humane—element back into controls without giving up governance. The lesson for travel leaders is simple: Don’t just tell employees what the policy says. Help them understand why it exists.
2. Use data to understand behavior, not just identify exceptions.
Travel programs generate an enormous amount of information. Organizations can see rejected expenses, out-of-policy bookings, spending exceptions, repeated overages, and other signals that something may not be working as intended. But identifying an exception is only the beginning.
Jeanne shared an example from her own experience managing travel and expense: “I noticed there was a lot of overage of meals by particular people. It was the same group, time and time again. But when I started looking at it and noticed where they were traveling, they were traveling to really high expense places, so the meal limit bought them maybe orange juice and a bagel and a cup of coffee in the morning, and that would be it for the rest of the day.”
Looking only at the numbers could have suggested a compliance problem. Instead, Jeanne decided to look deeper. She found that those employees were consistently traveling to expensive destinations where the existing meal allowance simply wasn’t realistic. The data surfaced the issue, but a conversation revealed the context. That allowed the organization to find a solution that supported compliance, controlled costs, and made employees feel heard.
“It gave us a chance to actually go to them and say, ‘Hey, what would work best for you here?’ And it kept everybody compliant. It kept costs in control. It gave the employee much more trust that we were listening to them even when they weren’t talking to us.”
— Jeanne Dion, Global Vice President of Customer Advisory, SAP Concur
That same principle applies as organizations incorporate more AI into travel and expense processes. AI can help analyze information, surface anomalies, automate routine work, and bring potential problems to a person’s attention. But it doesn’t eliminate the need for human judgment.
Sara described an expense that repeatedly failed an automated process even though the trip itself was valid, properly documented, and compliant. Ultimately, a person discovered the problem: the traveler had selected the wrong option from a dropdown menu.
“It kept getting rejected, kept getting rejected," Sara recalled. "It absolutely was a trip that happened. Receipts were attached, the date, the time, everything was correct."
When she reached out to the T&E manager responsible for approving the expense, the issue became clear. As Sara remembers it, the manager told her, “Oh, you actually had to choose shuttle for that, not taxi.”
The bigger lesson here: Data can show organizations where to look and AI can help surface what deserves attention, but ultimately people still need to interpret what those signals mean. As Jeanne said near the end of the podcast, data should reveal the human experience, not replace it.
3. Look beyond the cost of a trip to understand its value.
Travel leaders are increasingly being asked to demonstrate the value of business travel. The survey illustrates why that conversation can be difficult. While 82% of CFOs said they plan to increase travel budgets, they also want greater evidence of the value those investments generate. At the same time, 84% of travel leaders said they need more support in justifying business travel to CFOs.
“There is just this almost metaphorical brick wall between them that’s stopping them from actually voicing those concerns to each other.”
— Sara Sarwar
Both groups want many of the same things, but the disconnect might be in how they communicate about them. For example, calculating the cost of airfare, hotels, meals, and ground transportation is relatively straightforward, but measuring what a trip accomplished can be so much more complex. Some of those questions to determine the value of business travel often sound like:
Did an in-person meeting help close a deal?
Strengthen a customer relationship?
Improve collaboration?
Give employees access to colleagues they rarely see?
Support engagement or wellbeing?
More than 90% of surveyed business travelers said business travel positively affects their mental or physical wellbeing, citing benefits such as a change in scenery and opportunities to connect with colleagues face-to-face. Those outcomes may not fit neatly into a single travel expense report, but that doesn’t make them irrelevant to business value.
For finance and travel leaders, the opportunity is to move the conversation from: “What did this trip cost?” to, “What did this trip accomplish?”
“The value in a trip is far beyond just what we paid for the plane ticket, the hotel, and the meals.”
— Jeanne Dion
Doing so may require bringing together travel data with insights from finance, HR, sales, operations, and other parts of the business, which leads to the final takeaway.
4. Travel managers shouldn’t have to operate alone.
Modern business travel touches far more than booking. Travel programs intersect with employee experience, finance, IT, security, procurement, tax, payroll, legal, duty of care, compliance, and more. Yet travel managers can still find themselves expected to manage many of those priorities from inside a relatively narrow organizational silo.
That needs to change. Cross-functional collaboration can give:
Travel leaders access to expertise and data they may not have on their own.
HR help to uncover employee sentiment.
IT and procurement to evaluate technology.
Finance to connect travel activities with broader business outcomes.
Security and legal teams to provide critical guidance around risk and duty of care.
Business travelers themselves should also have a voice. Employee surveys, roundtables, policy feedback, and conversations with frequent travelers can help organizations understand both what is and isn’t working. And collaboration doesn’t diminish the role of the travel manager. It can make that role more strategic.
“Travel leaders, and by extension, any function leader should start seeing themselves as strategic leaders really of any business.”
— Sara Sarwar
As Sara explained, travel leaders can only fully support the business when they understand what is happening across it—from what employees need to what CFOs expect. Open communication and collaboration make that possible.
“Communication and collaboration are always going to be very underrated skills. It’s one that travel leaders already have, and I think now more than ever going forward, they should feel totally comfortable in utilizing that.”
— Sara Sarwar
Building travel programs around people
Perhaps the biggest lesson from the research is that the problems organizations see on the surface aren't always the real problems. For example, building travel programs around real people means that:
A policy violation might signal confusion
An expense exception might reveal an unrealistic limit
Shadow AI use might indicate employees don’t have an approved tool that meets their needs
Resistance to a safety policy might simply mean no one has clearly explained its purpose
The answer isn’t to abandon control, compliance, or technology. It’s to pair them with context, communication, collaboration, and human judgment. Because better business travel programs aren’t built simply by creating more rules – they’re built by understanding the people expected to follow them.
“It really comes down to speaking to the employees firsthand, asking them those questions rather than trying to guess.” — Sara Sarwar
Want to hear the full conversation?
Listen to the latest episode “Fear, Anxiety, and Trust: The Human Lens Behind Business Travel” to hear Jeanne Dion and Sara Sarwar explore the findings from the Global Business Travel Survey, including what they reveal about fear, anxiety, trust, AI, compliance, and the changing role of travel leaders.
