Corporate Travel Costs Are Rising. Here's How to Get Control.

Fuel surcharges, tariffs, and hotel inflation are pushing corporate travel costs up. Here's how to get control without grounding your team.

Natasha Sasson 8 min read Feb 18, 2026

If your company's travel budget felt harder to manage in the last year than it did the year before, you're not imagining it. Airfare is up. Hotel rates in major business destinations are up. Fuel surcharges have increased. And the broader economic uncertainty from tariffs and supply chain pressures is working its way into travel pricing in ways that aren't always visible until the credit card statement arrives.

For companies managing travel without a proper program — no booking tool, no negotiated rates, no visibility into spend — every one of these increases hits at full retail price. There's no buffer, no negotiated floor, and no data to understand where the money is actually going.

This is the moment when the cost of not having a managed travel program becomes impossible to ignore.

What's actually driving costs up

Understanding what's behind the increases matters — because different drivers call for different responses.

Fuel surcharges

Airlines pass higher operating costs directly to travelers through fuel surcharges added to ticket prices. Even a modest per-ticket increase compounds quickly across a company with regular travel volume.

Tariff uncertainty

Tariffs affect aircraft components, fuel infrastructure, and supply chains that feed into airline and hotel operations. The uncertainty itself drives pricing conservatism — rates go up as a hedge against future cost increases.

Reduced airline capacity

On certain routes, airlines have pulled capacity — fewer flights means less competition for seats and higher fares across all booking windows, not just last-minute.

Hotel rate inflation

Business hotel rates in major markets have outpaced general inflation for several years running. Without negotiated corporate rates, companies are booking at whatever the market rate is on the day they search.

The difference a managed program makes

Companies without negotiated rates absorb every increase at full price. Companies with a managed travel program have a negotiated floor — hotel rates locked in by contract, airline preferred pricing, and advance booking rules that keep fares from spiking. They're not immune to rising costs, but they're not paying retail for them either.

The companies most exposed right now

Not every company feels rising travel costs equally. The ones most exposed are those with one or more of these characteristics:

No centralized booking tool — travelers book wherever they want, and no one has full visibility into what's being spent
No negotiated hotel or car rental rates — paying rack rate on every trip
No advance booking enforcement — last-minute bookings are common, and last-minute fares have increased the most
Unused ticket credits going untracked — money left on the table every month
No quarterly spend reviews — cost trends aren't visible until the annual budget process
Travel managed by someone doing it as a secondary job — an EA, finance director, or office manager without the tools or bandwidth to optimize

If more than two of these describe your company, you're almost certainly absorbing more of the current cost increases than you need to be.

Five things you can do right now

Get visibility into what you're actually spending

You can't manage what you can't see. If your travel spend is scattered across personal credit cards, corporate cards with no categorization, and bookings on consumer sites, your first move is consolidating everything through a single platform. SAP Concur captures every booking in real time — air, hotel, car rental — and makes the data available for reporting immediately. Before you can negotiate rates or enforce policy, you need to know what you're spending and where.

Negotiate hotel and car rental rates based on your actual volume

Most mid-size companies don't realize they have enough volume to negotiate meaningful corporate rates. If your travelers frequent specific cities — even a handful of trips per month to the same market — you likely have enough volume to get a preferred hotel rate. A travel management company handles these negotiations on your behalf, typically within the first weeks of onboarding. The rates belong to you, not the TMC — you keep them even if you ever switch providers.

Enforce advance booking requirements

In a rising fare environment, the gap between booking two weeks out and booking two days out has widened. Last-minute bookings are consistently the most expensive fares — and in tighter airline markets, availability at reasonable prices dries up faster. Configuring your booking platform to flag or require approval for bookings inside a certain window is one of the fastest ways to reduce average fare costs without cutting a single trip.

Recover unused airline credits before they expire

Every cancelled or changed non-refundable ticket generates a credit. In a period of higher travel costs and more last-minute schedule changes, unused credits are accumulating faster than usual — and expiring just as fast. A managed travel program with centralized booking tracks every credit, flags expiration dates, and applies them to future bookings proactively. For companies with moderate travel volume, this alone can recover thousands of dollars a year that would otherwise be lost.

Review spend quarterly — not just at budget time

Annual budget reviews don't catch cost trends in time to respond to them. If your hotel costs in one market jumped 20% in Q2 because your volume there increased and you're still paying rack rate, you want to know that in Q3 — not in January when you're building next year's budget. Quarterly business reviews with your TMC surface these shifts while there's still time to act: negotiate a rate, adjust policy, or shift volume to a preferred property.

$78K

saved annually — Telios insurance client on $1.2M spend

reduction in total travel costs — without cutting trips

The honest calculation

A managed travel program isn't free. There are transaction fees for bookings — online and agent-assisted — and depending on your program structure, potentially a platform fee for Concur. These are real costs.

But the calculation isn't "does the program cost money." It's "does the program cost more than the savings it generates." For most companies with $100K or more in annual travel spend, the answer is no — and in a rising cost environment, that math tips further in favor of a managed program.

Negotiated hotel rates, advance booking enforcement, unused credit recovery, and better policy compliance don't just save money in good times. They insulate your program from external cost pressures that you have no control over. When fares go up, you're paying your negotiated rate — not whatever the market is doing that week.

One of our clients — an insurance company spending $1.2M annually on travel — reduced costs by $78,481 in a single year through a combination of these levers. Not by cutting trips. By managing travel properly.

If your travel budget is feeling the pressure of rising costs and you don't have a program in place, contact us. We'll walk you through what the numbers look like for your spend level.

Common questions

Rising travel costs — FAQ

Several factors are driving corporate travel costs up in 2025: fuel surcharges have increased as airlines pass higher operating costs to travelers, tariff uncertainty is affecting international routes and pricing, hotel rates in major business destinations continue to outpace inflation, and airlines have reduced capacity on certain routes which drives fares higher. Companies without negotiated rates or a managed travel program are absorbing the full impact of these increases.

The most effective ways to reduce corporate travel costs without eliminating travel are: negotiating preferred rates with hotels and car rental companies based on your actual volume, consolidating airline spend on fewer carriers to unlock corporate pricing, enforcing advance booking requirements to avoid last-minute fare premiums, recovering unused ticket credits before they expire, and implementing a booking platform that gives finance real-time visibility into spend. None of these require cutting trips — they require managing travel properly.

A fuel surcharge is an additional fee airlines add to ticket prices to offset the cost of jet fuel. When fuel prices rise, airlines typically increase fuel surcharges across their fare categories. For companies with significant air travel volume, even a modest per-ticket surcharge increase can add up to thousands of dollars annually. Corporate rate negotiations with airlines can sometimes include caps or protections on surcharge increases.

Tariffs affect business travel costs primarily through two channels: higher operating costs for airlines that get passed through to fares, and broader economic uncertainty that affects hotel pricing, currency exchange rates for international travel, and the cost of ground transportation. Companies with negotiated corporate rates are somewhat insulated from these fluctuations; companies booking at retail prices absorb every increase.

The right time is when the cost of not having one — in unmanaged spend, absorbed price increases, and staff time spent on booking and disruptions — exceeds the cost of a managed program. For most companies, this threshold is around $100K in annual travel spend. At that level, the savings from negotiated rates, advance booking enforcement, and unused credit recovery typically offset program costs within the first year. In a rising cost environment, that calculation tips even earlier.

Written by

Natasha Sasson

Director of Account Management & Sales

Your first call and your ongoing partner. Natasha leads account management and sales at Telios — the primary point of contact for every client relationship, making sure each program runs the way it should.

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