Nearly two thirds of global business travel spend is unmanaged. Not tracked through a booking tool, not negotiated against a corporate rate, not visible to anyone until the expense report lands on someone's desk weeks later. That is the headline finding from a 2025 Euromonitor International study commissioned by Navan, and it is not a small-company footnote buried in the data. Small and mid-size businesses, defined in the study as companies with 1 to 200 employees, make up 26.1% of the entire business travel market and are growing faster than any other segment, at a compound annual rate of 7.1% through 2029.
Put plainly: the fastest-growing part of the corporate travel market is also the part with the least structure around it.
That is not a criticism of how these companies are run. It is a description of how they grow. A 12-person company does not need a travel policy. A 45-person company with three people traveling twice a month probably thinks it doesn't need one either, right up until someone asks where the money went.
Nobody decided this. It just happened.
Ask most growing companies who owns the travel budget and you will get a pause, then a name that also does three other jobs. SAP Concur's research on small business travel programs found the same pattern across the market: small companies rarely have a dedicated travel manager, so the role gets absorbed by whoever is already stretched thin, an office manager, an HR generalist, a bookkeeper closing the books at month end. None of them were hired to manage travel. All of them are now responsible for it, in the margins of a job that already had a full list.
An analysis from CapTrav puts a number on how widespread this actually is: more than 90% of business travelers work for small or mid-market companies, and less than 10% of total industry travel volume is formally managed by anyone. The other 90% is employees on consumer booking sites, using whatever card is easiest, making individually reasonable decisions that add up to a company with no idea what it actually spends on travel or why.
This works fine when it is three people flying twice a quarter. It stops working the moment the company hires a sales team, opens a second office, or starts sending people to client sites regularly. The problem is that "the moment it stops working" rarely announces itself. It just shows up later as a bigger number on the P&L that nobody can fully explain.
What the absence of a policy actually costs
Three things happen when nobody owns the travel budget, and they compound on each other.
The company pays retail for everything. Every booking is an individual transaction at whatever rate is showing that day. There is no volume, no negotiated corporate rate, no consistency to leverage into a better deal with a preferred hotel or airline. A company spending $200,000 a year on scattered individual bookings is paying full freight on money that a managed program would be actively working to reduce.
Duty of care becomes a guess. If a manager cannot say, in a single sentence, where every traveling employee is on a given Tuesday, the company does not have visibility into its own travel risk. That is not a hypothetical compliance concept. It is the practical question that comes up the moment a flight gets cancelled, a region becomes unsafe, or an employee needs help and nobody at the company knows which hotel they checked into.
The gap gets harder to close every quarter it is ignored. A company with no travel policy and five travelers can fix that in an afternoon. A company with no travel policy and forty travelers, three offices, and eighteen months of scattered booking history has a much larger cleanup project, and by then the bad habits are load-bearing. People have their preferred sites, their own workarounds, their own definition of normal. Undoing that costs real time and real political capital that a smaller, earlier fix would never have required.
None of this shows up as a single dramatic number. It shows up as a slow leak, which is exactly why it survives so long inside companies that are watching every other line item closely.
The absence of a travel policy is not neutral. It is a default setting, and the default is set to unmanaged, unnegotiated, and invisible.
Why a longer policy is not the fix
The instinct, once a company notices the gap, is often to write a long, thorough policy document that covers every scenario. New research from a 2026 joint study between ALTOUR and the Global Business Travel Association suggests this instinct works against itself. Just over half of corporate travel policies now run longer than ten pages, and nearly a quarter run past twenty. Meanwhile, average attention span for a single task has dropped to roughly 47 seconds. Employees are not reading thirty-page documents, and the same research found that 32% of policy violations happen for exactly that reason: the traveler never read or understood the rule they broke.
The same study found that 87% of corporate travel programs already require the use of a managed booking tool, and it still is not solving the problem. 35% of travel managers say bookings made outside that tool remain their single biggest compliance issue, and 28% point specifically to hotel bookings made off the approved channel. Only 30% of programs use a fixed hotel rate cap; most rely on vague "reasonable" guidance that different people interpret differently.
The lesson is not that policy doesn't matter. It's that a policy nobody reads is functionally the same as no policy at all. A one-page document that clearly states which channel to book through, what the rate ceiling is, and who approves exceptions will outperform a thirty-page manual sitting unread in a shared drive.
What actually works at this size
None of this requires hiring a full-time travel manager or signing a contract with a legacy travel management company built for a 5,000-person enterprise. That model was designed for a different kind of organization, and forcing it onto a 30-person company just adds cost and process the team will resent and route around.
What a growing company actually needs is smaller than that: a single, short policy that states the booking channel, the rate guardrails, and the approval path in plain language. A person, even a fractional one, who is explicitly accountable for the travel budget, not just absorbing it as an unspoken fifth responsibility. And a quarterly look at where the spend is actually going, so patterns get caught after one quarter instead of after two years.
That is the entire difference between a company that controls its travel spend and one that is quietly bleeding it. It is not about scale. It is about somebody being explicitly in charge of a budget line that, left alone, defaults to nobody being in charge of it at all.
The Travel Leak Calculator on this site walks through where that leak typically shows up for a company your size, using your own numbers rather than a generic industry estimate. It takes about two minutes and tells you more than a guess would.
You already know roughly what you spend on travel. Do you know what you're losing?
A 30-minute conversation is usually enough to find out where the gap actually is and what closing it would take. No pitch. You keep the findings either way.
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