U.S. Business Traveler Report 2020

Summary

Traditionally managed programs depended heavily on controlling the booking channel of the business traveler for duty of care and policy compliance reasons, but Phocuswright’s recent survey uncovered serious gaps in a company’s ability to control where managed travel is booked. Companies of all sizes face an ongoing struggle with channel leakage (i.e., booking out of the company-recommended channel). This ongoing clash continues to present serious problems for data integration, compliance tracking and duty of care. The question is not whether managed travel programs have leakage, but how that leakage is being captured. With a quarter of the managed traveler population booking with OTAs or on supplier.com sites, fragmentation of the booking process is real and needs to be tracked and measured. 

In this context, Phocuswright conducted a comprehensive survey of U.S. business travelers. The results reinforce this shift in managed traveler behavior. They also bring to light where the business traveler shops and books their travel, the role the corporate travel tool/app plays in the process and the reasons behind policy leakage. The study also looks into the mind of the unmanaged business traveler who, by definition, is not controlled by a travel policy but often demonstrates some of the same tradeoffs between cost and convenience when shopping and booking travel.