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.
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.
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.
