Best business travel management solutions for 2026

With global business travel spend projected to reach $1.62 trillion in 2026, it’s clear that in-person work is back in a big way. For larger organisations, that growth is positive. But it comes with a direct operational cost.

More travel doesn’t just mean higher spend. It means more employees on the move, more trips booked across entities and regions, more currencies to manage, and more policy exceptions to control.

As volume increases, the margin for error shrinks. What once felt manageable with single booking tools and post-trip expense checks quickly turns into delayed invoices, inconsistent policy enforcement, and unpredictable month-end adjustments.

The problem rarely shows up when a trip is booked. It appears weeks later. Cards look fine. Then invoices arrive late. FX differences surface. Emissions data is missing. Finance ends up rebuilding the story at month-end, after the money is already spent.

At this scale, single booking tools and manual reconciliation can’t keep pace. Finance teams need control before spend happens, not fixes after the trip.

This guide explains how modern travel management platforms replace fragmented tools with one connected workflow. You’ll see which features matter in 2026, how AI prevents overspend before it starts, and how to choose the right platform for your organisation.

Features that matter most in corporate travel management software in 2026

In 2026, travel management is about enforcing policy and spend before booking, not reconciling it after.

For finance and operations teams, it’s about automating the full workflow - approvals, policies, payments, reconciliation, and reporting, so you get real-time visibility and reduce manual work across entities.

Let’s explore travel management features that are non-negotiable in 2026:

1. AI is now a baseline, not a ‘nice-to-have.’ AI is now a baseline, not a nice-to-have. In travel management, its value comes from where it operates in the workflow. The best AI travel agents review bookings against policy in real time, prevent out-of-policy spend before it’s confirmed, automatically chase missing receipts, and flag unusual spending patterns without adding manual work for finance.

The biggest shift is that finance intervenes before money is committed, not after expenses land.

2. ESG and sustainability aren’t optional anymore. Regulations (like the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD)) require travel managers to report on emissions. This isn’t easy, especially when emissions data is collected after the trip, making it incomplete and hard to audit. But finding travel and expense software that captures this data automatically makes ESG and sustainability reporting far easier by recording emissions data at the moment of booking, rather than relying on manual estimates months later.

3. Multi-entity consolidation. If your business operates across multiple entities, currencies, or regions, your travel management platform needs to automatically consolidate spend while still enforcing the correct policy for each entity. Without this, travel becomes a recurring source of manual adjustments at close.

4. Complete control instead of partial visibility. Finance should have visibility into every trip from the moment of request, so they don't have to manually rebuild the picture when post-travel expenses land in their spend management system.

As Payhawk CFO Konstantin Dzhengozov explains.

For real cash flow visibility? Finance teams should be able to see committed travel spend before receipts and invoices arrive.

5. Mobile-first is uncompromisable. As employees travel with their phones, it makes sense to introduce an app they can use to take receipt pictures, book hotels and flights, and track approvals. In short: Mobile capture determines whether receipts arrive during the trip or weeks later.

6. HR needs duty-of-care tools built in. Trip data should be in real-time; this makes it easy to pinpoint where travelling employees are. Your teams can proactively assess risk levels, giving them the ability to act quickly when plans change.

7. Continuous sync with deep ERP and HRIS integrations. These integrations mean expenses, bookings, and approvals always follow the right accounting rules without manual mapping.

8. Access to competitive FX rates. We’re all out here trying to get a good deal, and you can save significantly by choosing the right travel management solution. One that offers competitive FX rates means you can maximise your travel budget.

This is one of the reasons June Fund chose Payhawk. David Rosskamp, Founder and General Partner at June Fund, explains:

One standout feature that resonated with us was Payhawk's exceptional foreign exchange (FX) rates, which are crucial for our team as we frequently travel worldwide. The low FX rates mean we can save significantly on currency conversion costs, ultimately maximising our travel budget.

What mid-market and enterprise teams expect from travel management in 2026

It's 2026, and travel management expectations have shifted. Mid-market and enterprise teams aren’t looking for better booking tools. They expect systems that give finance earlier control, clearer visibility, and less manual work as travel volume grows.

The following capabilities are now table stakes for teams managing travel at scale.

Automated policy enforcement that catches issues before it’s too late

Fixing travel overspend after the fact slows month-end and makes it less predictable. Automated policy checks catch issues before travellers book, keeping spend compliant without having finance teams review every request manually.

End-to-end visibility across travel, cards, and reconciliation

Visibility is more than seeing transactions after they happen. We’re talking about complete visibility:

• You can see real-time spend per traveller and trip
• Multi-entity reporting that rolls up correctly
• Consolidated ERP synchronisation without manual mapping
• Automated reconciliation between card data and booking invoices
• Centralised policy controls that work across all entities

When booking data, card transactions, and expense submissions sit in different systems, your team spends hours every month reconciling mismatched records - slowing down close and creating risk in your reporting. Instead, unifying your systems into a single travel management solution makes the month-end close more straightforward and error-free.

Like FlowDesk, who utilise Payhawk’s native integration with NetSuite. Eric Olombel, CFO at Flowdesk describes:

Payhawk connects directly to NetSuite, and accounting is practically automated! What used to take a full day each month, like processing expenses, now takes just a few minutes.

Global consistency across distributed teams

If you’re looking for centralised oversight while keeping a hybrid or distributed workforce, you absolutely can have that with a travel management system. Just because your teams are spread out and travelling all over the world, doesn’t mean you can’t access consistent spending data from one place.

To manage a distributed team effectively, you need a standardised process for bookings, approvals, and expenses that still meets local compliance requirements. Mid-market organisations expanding into new regions often struggle to strike this balance without automation.

It’s the simplicity of global travel management that the Rentals United team finds helpful. Javier Gorena,
CFO at Rentals United explains. “If an employee has a card solely to make a work trip, as soon as the trip is over, we can freeze the card until the next trip. That's the beauty of Payhawk. Everything is kept under control, and we can make decisions at the click of a button, both to request funds and to freeze cards fast."

Reduced admin for finance, HR, and travellers

Manual expense processing takes around 20 minutes per report. At scale, mid-market finance teams lose hundreds of hours per month on tasks AI can now automate - receipt chasing, policy checks, categorisation, VAT collection, and reconciliation.

At scale, manual travel admin becomes a capacity problem, not an efficiency one. It’s 2026, there’s no need to manually chase receipts, manually approve expenses, category map, or put up with the VAT headaches. All these tasks and more should be run by AI (within strict built-in guardrails).

ESG and duty-of-care visibility, built into one workflow

It’s essential that travel teams can easily track sustainability metrics. You don’t want to waste time manually collecting this data; it’s long, drawn-out, and, frankly, riddled with errors. But if you can automatically build them into your core workflow, i.e., capturing the data at the point of booking, you won't have to reconstruct them later.

Why consolidate travel, payments, and expenses?

There are tonnes of reasons to consolidate travel, payments, and expenses. Here are the top three:

1. Rising pressure to reduce the total cost of ownership. Every additional travel or expense tool adds licensing cost, IT maintenance, and integration overhead. Consolidating travel, payments, and expenses into a single platform reduces your total cost of ownership and provides accurate, connected data for reporting and forecasting.
2. CFOS wants fewer systems, integrations, and risks. 93% of CFOs struggle to harness technology because of disparate solutions and disconnected data. And a lack of accurate data leads to poor spending decisions.
3. AI enforcement only works when booking, cards, and expenses share the same data layer. If booking data lives separately from your card transactions or expense submissions, how can you intelligently enforce policy using AI? Your systems don’t connect.

Note: Real-time policy enforcement across booking, cards, and spend is only possible in an integrated platform.

AI is the standard going into 2026, not a bonus

Payhawk's AI Travel Agent has many time-saving, compliance-boosting benefits. Here are just some of the main AI agent capabilities and how it helps in real-life scenarios.

What the AI travel agent does

They manage the entire travel workflow, from reviewing bookings against company policies to intelligently routing approvals.

A travel AI agent can:

• Flag risky or expensive choices before you confirm them
• Reduces manual checks, currently wasting the finance team's time
• Improves audit-readiness by ensuring complete documentation
• Suggests compliant alternatives automatically (cutting the human back-and-forth)
• Reviews bookings instantly against even the most complex company policies

How AI improves compliance and reduces travel overspend

There are plenty of ways AI improves travel management:

1. Fewer mistakes because you enforce policy upfront
2. You reduce rogue bookings because compliant options are the only path (and compliance is easy thanks to high adoption as the solution is so easy to use!)
3. With AI suggesting budget-friendly alternatives, you can cut travel costs without even thinking about it
4. You’re levelling up finance team productivity. They get time back, instead of wasting time chasing approvals and receipts, they can focus on more add-value tasks like strategy and forecasting.

Learn more about Payhawk's AI Travel Agent in the short video below (thanks to Farah Rouassi, VP Finance & Strategic Partnerships at global media company, Paradox, for sharing their experience.)

Real 2026 scenarios

Recognise any of these situations? Finance teams are facing these daily

• Multi-entity sales teams booking globally. When your sales teams book travel across multiple entities, you need consistent approvals, policy rules, and currency handling. AI automatically applies this, so spend stays compliant no matter where bookings occur.
• A hybrid workforce with frequent off-sites. Overspending is easy when there’s an influx of events or many quarterly gatherings. This can easily tip into overspending if you don’t have a travel management system keeping you on track.
• Rapid hiring requires travel for onboarding. If your new hires need to visit headquarters for training and are unfamiliar with your policies, AI can help guide them to make compliant spending choices.
• International expansion, which means new entities. Not all countries have the same compliance requirements. AI helps adapt policies automatically.
• Stricter sustainability policies need reporting. You need emissions data to fulfil your ESG commitments, and guess what? AI strikes again, capturing it all at the point of booking.

The top business travel management solutions for 2026

Here are the top choices currently on the market. Bear in mind that not every solution will suit your specific business needs. Always take advantage of trial periods or live demo sessions to see the product working in your environment.

Payhawk

Within the Payhawk platform, you can centralise business travel management, payments, corporate cards, and ERP and accounting system integrations under one roof. Our travel AI agent manages the entire travel journey, from booking requests to final reconciliation.

Our intelligent system works hard to lighten and streamline the travel workload for everyone: travel managers, finance team members, employees, and approvers. And having travel bookings, expense submissions, and card transactions in the same system, manual reconciliation is a thing of the past.

Perk

Perk offers customers a large inventory of travel options and built-in policy controls. It’s a platform that caters to small to medium businesses. It offers flexible cancellation options.

Navan

Navan is a platform combining travel booking and expense management. The system uses AI to offer travel insights and recommendations, which can help customers save money (and incentivise employees with a rewards programme for booking under budget).

Airbnb for Work

The corporate side of the predominantly consumer platform, Airbnb for Work, offers companies seeking travel accommodation outside traditional hotel settings. Through the platform, you can centralise billing and access basic policy controls.

SAP Concur

If you’re an existing SAP user, particularly, you’ll likely find SAP Concur’s deep integrations useful. SAP Concur offers travel, expense, and invoice management in the same comprehensive platform. It’s a good fit for larger organisations with very complex requirements.

TravelBank

TravelBank brings corporate card programmes together with expense management and travel booking. Like Navan, TravelBank also offers employee incentive programmes. Its mobile-first approach makes booking and expense submission easy for everyone.

Amex GBT Egencia

With 24/7 human-agent support, this corporate travel management platform facilitates self-service booking, policy control, and integrated travel and expense data under one platform. It offers flexible, multi-level approval workflows and enforced travel policy rules, so you can closely control all bookings without manual intervention.

How to choose the right 2026 travel management solution

Not every business has the same needs, that much we all know. That’s why it’s important to research your options and check whether the features on offer will add value to your existing business processes.

To select the right travel management platform, mid-market finance teams typically follow a three-step framework:

• Map your policies and processes
• Identify bottlenecks and hidden costs
• Evaluate vendors using clear criteria

Start by asking these seven questions:

1. How complex are your travel policies? If you have sustainability requirements or multi-entity policies with role-based exceptions, your policies are far beyond simple company rules. Which means there’s room for misinterpretation.
2. Do you need multi-entity controls? If you have more than one entity, it’s likely that they each need different policies. It’s also possible you’ll need multi-currency support and automatic consolidated reporting functionality.
3. Are cards, expenses, and travel unified or siloed? If you’re currently working across disparate systems, you’re hampering data visibility. Not to mention the cost of system upkeep.
4. Who needs visibility? You don’t need everyone to access all data. The CFO will need much greater visibility than a standard user. The great thing about a system like Payhawk is that you can tailor access for all levels of the organisation. The CFO can access advanced visibility across company expenses, custom data fields, and AI-driven insights. Whereas an employee or cardholder can typically just see their expenses, cards, and basic relevant spend data.
5. How important is real-time policy enforcement? If you find employees book out-of-policy, or you’re scaling and compliance is a real concern, you need an automated solution. One that automatically enforcements all policies before you confirm bookings, not after.
6. What’s your TCO target? Understand your Total Cost of Ownership, including licensing, implementation, maintaining integrations, admin time, training, etc.
7. Do you need sustainability reporting? If you need emissions data for ESG commitments, you need a system that automatically captures it when you book, helping you proactively reduce your global carbon footprint.

How much travel spend do you control before booking today?

Most finance teams only see the full picture once the trip is over. By then, the money is already spent.

See what changes when policy, cards, and expenses are connected in one workflow.

Get a personalised walkthrough of Payhawk’s Travel AI Agent and see how you can:

• Enforce policy before travellers book
• Consolidate travel, cards, and expenses in one system
• Reduce reconciliation time across all entities
• Improve forecasting with real-time spend visibility

Book a personalised demo.