When Everyone Owns a Piece of Business Travel: How Travel Leaders Can Lead from the Middle

"When Everyone Owns a Piece of Business Travel" is an eBook for travel managers (TMs) who are held accountable for costs, compliance, and traveler safety—outcomes shaped by decisions made in finance, IT, HR, and procurement, not by travel alone. Drawing on data from the 8th Annual SAP Concur Global Business Travel Survey and GBTA Convention 2026, the eBook provides a practical three-part framework for leading from the middle: defining decision rights, building cross-functional influence, and converting recurring traveler friction into actionable business intelligence.

How can travel managers define decision rights when multiple functions share accountability for business travel?

Shared program ownership creates accountability drift. Responsibility for outcomes like traveler safety is divided across corporate security, third-party risk providers, business leaders, and travelers themselves—and because no single function owns the outcome entirely, accountability tends to settle on travel by default. The eBook provides a framework for mapping who recommends, decides, and executes each choice affecting cost, safety, compliance, and user experience, and for establishing escalation paths before high-risk situations arise.

How should travel leaders build influence over decisions owned by other departments?

At GBTA Convention 2026, 57% of travel managers named influencing internal stakeholders as their greatest professional challenge, ranking it above managing traveler behavior. The eBook explains how cross-functional translation works in practice: taking the same program evidence and framing it through the lens each function tracks—cost containment for finance, systems risk for IT, employee impact for HR, and supplier performance for procurement. It also addresses when and how to engage executive sponsorship, particularly with CFOs, to break cross-functional deadlocks.

What is the right response when travelers use unauthorized AI tools or break expense policy?

72% of business travelers have used or would use non-approved shadow AI tools to plan or book travel, and 48% have bent or broken travel or expense policy. Mandated programs show nearly the same breach rate as non-mandated ones (50% vs. 53%), which suggests enforcement alone is an insufficient response. The eBook argues that recurring friction is more often a systemic signal than individual misbehavior, and that travel leaders are uniquely positioned to bring root-cause data directly to the function with authority to fix it.

What does leading from the middle mean for modern travel program management?

Leading from the middle means treating the travel function's cross-functional vantage point as a strategic asset. Travel managers see how a decision in one department affects another in ways few other roles can observe. The eBook shows how to use that perspective to clarify accountability, accelerate cross-functional decisions, and ensure shared program ownership never defaults entirely to travel. Download the eBook: When Everyone Owns a Piece of Business Travel.