The four -year drag of Business Travel, the pandemic was on its way to continuing this year, but the United States Trade war has scrambled that perspective.
“The great word is uncertainty,” said Suzanne Neufang, CEO of the Global Business Travel Association, which had predicted worldwide spending to increase the $ 1.64 billion in 2025, above an expected $ 1.48 billion in 2024.
But pessimism has increased abruptly amid the deep cuts of President Donald Trump to the government’s workforce and a wide range of tariffs. Now, about 29% of US corporate travel managers and equal participation abroad expect business trips to decrease this year due to government actions, according to a recent GBTA survey. The expected setbacks could crowd business trips by up to 22%, the group found.
Industry experts warn that bitter expectations so far have not translated into a collapse in reserves, despite the coldest demand signs.
Business Travel “has not fallen from a cliff,” said Jonathan Kletzel, travel leader, transport and logistics of the PWC consulting firm. “It is definitely limited at this time, but will people stop traveling? Probably not. If you are a heavy sales organization and you are not at the market meeting with your customers, your competitors are.”
Even so, the growing concerns about business trips coincide with the warnings of corporate leaders that the United States commercial policies have injected new uncertainty into an economy that only a few months ago looked for the way to take advantage of their strengths.
The CEO of Delta Air Lines, Ed Bastian, told CNBC last month that the carrier had to verify his expectations of what was being configured to be the “best financial year in our history.” The demand for travel was growing around 10% at the beginning of the year, but since then it has slowed, he said, partly because the companies rethink business trips and cuts to the Federal Work Force. Other airlines have marked similar concerns, in some cases adjusting their growth plans or backup capacity.
Hotel operators and reserve platforms are also feeling it. Expedia said Friday that the demand for trips in the United States is cooling. Marriott, Hyatt and Hilton each have reduced their financial forecasts in recent weeks, and the first of those hospitality giants warns the investors of “an expected continuation of decreases in the demand of the United States government.”
Since he resumed the position, Trump has supervised the massive shots and the reductions of expenses in the federal bureaucracy, with many of the changes led by the project of the efficiency department of multibillonary advisor Elon Musk. While some of the cuts have stopped in court, travel bookers for government contractors have resisted a few agitated months.
Global Travel Associates, an agency of the Washington area, DC that mainly serves government contractors, said that travel sales fell 20% in the first quarter. Several had funds linked to the United States Agency for International Development, which the Trump administration destroyed this spring, and those accounts have dropped by 75%-90%, estimated managing director Tom Ollinger.
Some of GTA’s clients changed only reimbursable plane tickets; Others canceled the scheduled meetings or arrested the new travel plans indefinitely, he said. In some cases, those with employees in long -term tasks abroad were told to leave everything and return to the operations base. “The organization provided them with unidirectional tickets to return,” said Ollinger.
“The government groups are not happening,” said Jan Freitag, national director of Market Analytics at the Costa Real Estate Data Signature. But many business meetings are still being held, and although individual business trips are a bit softer, “that could not be so much ahead,” he said.
However, Freitag warned: “He should [more] Tariffs hit and corporations make less sense of where their costs go, they will begin to reduce costs. And the easiest place to control costs is to travel and training. “
Navan, a Corporate Travel Management Service based in Palo Alto, California, said the reserves increased in the first four months of the year since the same period in 2024, despite a slight deceleration in April.
“There is certainly this feeling of waiting for another shoe to fall,” said Rich Liu, CEO of Travel de Navan. While the CEOs tell him that they are “feeling the squeeze” of the new import taxes and other policy movements, “they still have business to manage,” Liu said.
Individual business travelers seem to be anxious. The online travel insurance comparison Squaremouth saw an annual increase of 223% in the searches of the travel coverage of “Cancel for work reasons” last month, with purchases of those policies that jump from 53%.
“That tells us that travelers feel uncomfortable,” said Squaremouth executive director Rupa Mehta. “In uncertain economic times, they want to understand the cost and value of flexible coverage before committing.”
The current perspective is “a mixed bag,” said Lorraine Sileo, founder of Phocuswright, a world travel research firm. At the moment, “it seems that leisure trips will be affected more than business trips,” he said, adding that “corporations will take longer to feel the pinch of an economic recession” than for vacationers.
“We need to adopt an approach to wait and see” to see how business trips are trips, Sileo said: “But there are indications that it will be a slow year for all kinds of trips for the US market in 2025”.
