By Andrew Harrison-Chinn, CMO at Dragonpass
Corporate travel is becoming more strategically important at precisely the point when finance teams are under greater pressure to control it. As businesses operate across more markets, build geographically distributed teams and pursue international revenue earlier in their growth cycle, travel is shifting from a discretionary overhead into part of the infrastructure required to run a global organisation.
The difficulty is that many travel policies were designed for a different operating model. They still assume that quality is purchased primarily through the airline ticket, even though the modern business journey is made up of a far wider set of variables spanning airport access, working time, connectivity, recovery and onward travel. The financial case for separating those elements is increasingly compelling. Dragonpass analysis found that four London-to-Paris return journeys in BA Club Europe could cost £2,080 per employee, compared with £703 for four easyJet journeys including seat selection and an annual Dragonpass membership. The difference is £1,377 per traveller, rising to a potential £137,700 across 100 travelling employees.
At the same time, eliminating travel is rarely a realistic growth strategy and UK businesses spent around £45.05 billion on corporate travel in 2025, while almost all CFOs surveyed by SAP Concur, 97%, regarded business travel as important to organisational growth. Airfare also rose by more than 8% year on year during the first five months of 2026, intensifying the pressure to extract more value from every journey rather than simply approve fewer of them.
This becomes especially relevant for organisations with increasingly international footprints. Half of UK scale-ups already employ people overseas, while seven in ten regard exporting as crucial to growth and 70% are considering expanding their physical presence internationally. A company may now have commercial teams, and partners spread across several regions long before it develops the traditional infrastructure of a multinational business. Employees may need to move frequently between markets without the financial headroom associated with larger corporate travel programmes, meaning travel policy has to support international mobility without allowing cost to scale at the same rate as geographic expansion.
Reallocating Spend Across The Global Journey
Airport access, time-saving services, working environments and reliable connectivity can all be provided independently of the airline ticket, yet many corporate policies still underinvest in these areas. Only 8% of business travellers surveyed by Dragonpass said their employer covered Fast Track security, priority boarding or lounge access, despite 39% saying time-saving benefits would improve their experience and 41% prioritising measures that make travel less stressful.
The imbalance is financially significant because premium airfare is often being used to solve problems that originate elsewhere in the journey. Employees may select a higher-cost carrier because they associate it with greater comfort, smoother airport handling or loyalty status, even where a cheaper and more direct route is available. A travel benefits membership allows businesses to disaggregate those requirements. Lounge access, Fast Track, dining credit, travel eSIMs and airport transfers can be provided separately, giving finance teams more scope to enforce lower-cost or more direct routing while maintaining the services that make frequent international travel workable.
A company-level benefits structure creates a clearer annual cost base than repeated discretionary upgrades made across multiple employees, routes and markets, while also making the traveller experience more consistent across different airports and regions. Some 27% of business travellers say travel-related stress, discomfort or disruption has reduced their productivity, while 48% say improved travel benefits would positively influence their decision to remain with an employer. As international teams become more geographically dispersed, the quality of the journey increasingly intersects with working effectiveness and employee retention.
The next generation of corporate travel policy should therefore be designed around the economics of operating globally rather than the prestige attached to individual tickets. Businesses able to separate transport from experience can protect margins, support distributed teams and maintain face-to-face relationships across borders without allowing international growth to produce an equally rapid expansion in travel costs.
