Grounded by Caution: Amid an Uncertain Economy, Companies Are Cutting Travel Budget

With economic headwinds picking up this spring and summer, business travel is becoming one of the first line items to experience turbulence. 

“We’re seeing pushback on items as small as taxi journeys,” Bill Dobie, CEO of a London software company that often bills travel expenses to clients, told The Wall Street Journal. In this turbulent economic climate, it’s “very hard to predict” whether visiting clients face-to-face will pay off, he said.

Invesco, an asset manager, is curbing trips that don’t involve clients. Warner Bros. Discovery is asking employees to cancel travel that’s not “business critical.” Boston Scientific is accelerating cuts to its travel and other discretionary spending.

Reduced budgets for business travel follow other restrictions companies have implemented recently as part of broader efficiency efforts. At Meta Platforms, employees are now limited to four business trips a year, unless they receive special permission.

In March, the number of business trips sold by U.S. corporate travel agencies declined year-over-year for the third month in a row, according to Airlines Reporting Corp., which tracks agency ticket sales. Through April 26, corporate bookings at U.S. hotels fell 4% from a year earlier, according to hospitality analytics firm Kalibri Labs.

Cuts to travel budgets reverse a trend seen last year, when companies cooled to remote-work arrangements and sent more employees out on the road again. 

Federal spending cuts, including for travel expenses, have caused government bookings to fall by as much as 50%, according to executives at United Airlines Holdings.

Business travel “hasn’t fallen off a cliff,” Jonathan Kletzel, a travel, transportation and logistics leader at the consulting firm PwC, told NBC News. “It is definitely constrained right now, but will people stop traveling? Probably not. If you’re a sales-heavy organization and you’re not out in the market meeting with your clients, your competitors are.”

As David Friend, chief financial officer of Quantum Metric in Colorado Springs, Colo., told the Journal, seeing customers face-to-face remains essential to doing business.