Business Travel in Numbers
Summary
This interview-style session opens the Business Travel Track at ITB Berlin 2026 (the event's jubilee year), featuring VDR (German Business Travel Association) president Christoph Carnier in conversation with moderator Claudia Unger. The session is framed around data from the latest VDR Business Travel Report and covers spend recovery, trip behavior shifts, the blended travel trend, and the persistent challenge of data fragmentation in corporate travel management.
On spend vs. volume recovery, Carnier highlights a striking divergence: German corporate travel spend reached approximately €48 billion in the most recent reporting year, approaching the 2019 pre-pandemic level of €55 billion — a gap of roughly 10-12%. However, the number of trips tells a very different story, falling from 191 million in 2019 to approximately 107 million today — a drop of more than 40%. This means companies are spending nearly as much as before but taking far fewer trips, indicating longer, more expensive, and more purposeful journeys.
Carnier attributes the trip decline partly to a permanent behavioral shift accelerated by COVID: the disappearance of the short same-day trip — the early-morning departure, late-evening return — which has become largely obsolete for lower-priority meetings that can be handled online. In its place, travelers now take fewer but longer trips, often combining multiple objectives. The average trip duration has increased meaningfully, and blended travel (mixing business and leisure, sometimes called 'bleisure' or 'workation') has become mainstream.
On budget allocation, Carnier notes the perennial internal debate between investing travel budgets in customer-facing activities versus internal collaboration. His view is nuanced: customer-facing travel is where revenue is generated, but internal travel — visits to global colleagues, presence during reorganizations — remains essential and should not be dismissed as a red flag. Company culture and organizational stage (e.g., undergoing restructuring) are key determinants of how much internal travel is warranted.
The VDR has launched an initiative in partnership with GCB (German Convention Bureau) specifically to provide guidance on blended travel: what's permissible from a taxation and legal standpoint, what the dos and don'ts are, and how companies can incorporate bleisure into formal travel policy. Carnier notes that most companies already have informal or formal policy coverage for combined business-leisure trips, but clarity on where the business activity ends and personal time begins remains a practical and regulatory challenge.
On data, Carnier gives a detailed account of why travel data is uniquely difficult to manage versus other procurement categories. Unlike raw materials or IT, where there is typically one stakeholder and one invoice stream, travel has thousands of potential travelers as stakeholders and requires aggregating data from multiple sources: expense management tools, central payment systems, corporate credit cards (which in Europe often only show the card company name, not destination or class), and travel agency booking data. This fragmentation makes it hard for travel managers to understand true spend, out-of-policy behavior, pre-booking lead times, and to forecast annual demand. Carnier emphasizes that travel managers are uniquely burdened — they must aggregate company-wide demand across business units while also tracking market conditions, a task no other procurement function faces in the same way.
The session closes with a forward-looking note: the new VDR German Business Travel Analysis survey was just launched at the time of the interview, with results to be presented at the VDR conference in April 2026.
Key Takeaways
- •German corporate travel spend reached ~€48 billion in the most recent year, versus ~€55 billion in 2019 — a 10-12% gap — but the number of trips dropped over 40%, from 191 million to ~107 million, meaning fewer, longer, and more expensive trips are being taken.
- •The divergence between spend recovery and trip volume recovery is the defining data story of business travel right now: companies are almost back to pre-pandemic spend levels while conducting dramatically fewer journeys.
- •Same-day trips — depart in the morning, return at night — have 'drastically' declined because online alternatives are now accepted for lower-priority meetings; Carnier sees this as a lasting behavioral change, not a temporary trend.
- •Average trip duration has increased significantly, with travelers combining multiple business objectives or extending trips for personal reasons ('bleisure'), reducing scheduling pressure and making longer stays logistically easier.
- •COVID acted as an accelerator of flexible working norms: the ability to work from almost anywhere makes it easier to combine a business trip with personal days, and this is now routine for many corporate travelers.
- •Carnier's position on customer-facing vs. internal travel: both are necessary. Internal travel — especially during global reorganizations or for distributed teams — builds relationships and culture that cannot be replicated online, and dismissing it as a 'red flag' is an oversimplification.
- •VDR and GCB have jointly launched an initiative to define clear dos and don'ts for blended business-leisure travel, with a focus on taxation rules, legal compliance across countries, and what falls within or outside corporate travel policy.
- •Most companies already have travel policy provisions covering combined business-leisure trips, but the line between business and personal time is often fluid ('fluent'), and clearer definitional frameworks are needed — a core output the VDR initiative aims to deliver.
Transcript
Good morning and welcome to the business travel track here at ITB Berlin in its jubilee le year year. My name is Claudia Anger and I'll be guiding you through the day today and do the moderation. And today we are starting with a datadriven look at the state of business travel. And I'm very happy to invite the president of the VDR, the German Travel Business Travel Association to the stage this morning, Kristoff. [applause] Don't worry. Good morning and uh thanks for the applause. It's indeed not...
