10 Ways to Boost Your Corporate Travel ROI

Corporate travel exists to generate business outcomes such as closing deals, retaining clients, and keeping operations on track. But it’s very easy to make the mistake of treating every trip as an expense to minimize rather than an investment to optimize.

This guide covers 10 strategies to improve corporate travel ROI, from ensuring consistent policy enforcement to leveraging data analytics and duty-of-care protocols.

What Are the Three ROI Levers in Corporate Travel Programs?

To improve corporate travel ROI, keep the following levers in mind:

Cost Savings

Finding new ways to cut costs is the obvious solution to boosting ROI. It’s tangible, measurable, and speaks the language of finance. This lever includes negotiated hotel and airline rates, advance booking discounts, policy compliance that prevents overspending, and reduced fees through consolidated vendors.

The appeal is obvious: Cut $50 from the average hotel night across 10,000 bookings and you’ve saved $500,000. But cost savings have a ceiling. Once you’ve negotiated competitive rates and achieved reasonable compliance, the marginal gains shrink. More importantly, aggressive cost-cutting can backfire, by forcing employees to take inconvenient flights or sleep in substandard hotels.

Productivity Gains

Productivity is the ROI lever that many travel programs undervalue because the costs are dispersed and harder to quantify.

Consider what happens when travel systems create friction: employees spend more time than necessary when booking trips, finance teams burn hours reconciling fragmented expense data, travelers waste time rebooking cancelled flights because support is slow, and managers interrupt their work to approve routine travel requests.

According to Skift and Navan’s 2026 State of Corporate Travel and Expense report, 71% of travelers spend 30 minutes or more filing an expense report, with 36% spending over an hour. These are systematic drains on organizational capacity, and they add to the frustration that causes employees to avoid using corporate tools altogether.

Strategic Value

Strategic value captures what travel actually accomplishes for the business, whether it’s new deals or partnerships. For example, think of the revenue that your sales team generates from traveling to meet prospects face to face.

The challenge is attribution. When a $3,000 client trip contributes to a $300,000 deal, the ROI is extraordinary — but connecting that specific trip to that specific outcome requires intentional tracking. For companies that don’t make that connection, it’s easy to treat high-value strategic trips the same as routine operational travel.

10 Ways to Improve ROI on Corporate Travel

1. Benchmark Your Program Against Peers

Knowing your flight costs went up 12% means nothing without context. But knowing your costs are 12% higher than those of similar companies on the same routes helps you identify whether you have a negotiation problem (supplier discounts below market rates), a policy problem (low versus high enforcement), or a behavior problem (most travelers book off-platform despite company policies).

To find this data, ask for industry benchmarks from your travel platform. If it cannot provide these benchmarking metrics, this may indicate a lack of the data depth required to support strategic T&E optimization.

2. Know Which ROI Lever to Pull (and When)

Not all travel spend deserves the same treatment. Applying cost-savings tactics to revenue-generating travel can backfire, while treating commodity travel as strategic travel could waste resources.

When to Optimize for Cost Savings

Cost savings should be your primary focus when benchmark data reveals you’re significantly overpaying compared to peers on similar routes, or when travel volume is high but strategic importance per trip is low.

Optimizing for cost savings is also the best starting point if your program lacks basic controls and visibility. If you don’t know where money is going, you can’t optimize anything else. Cost optimization also makes sense when you’re establishing a new travel program and need quick wins to build credibility.

When to Optimize for Productivity Gains

Productivity should be your focus when systems are creating unnecessary friction. Signs that productivity deserves attention include low platform adoption (employees actively avoid your booking tools), the finance team spends hours on T&E administration, and frequent travelers or executives complain about the booking experience or support.

When to Optimize for Strategic Value

Strategic value optimization is the process of prioritizing high-impact travel and cutting any trip that doesn’t drive results.

This lever matters most when:

• Your business depends on in-person relationships (enterprise sales, professional services, client success)
• You’re entering new markets or pursuing major deals
• Travel data suggests little correlation between spend and results

3. Choose a User-Friendly Travel and Expense Platform

According to Skift and Navan’s 2026 State of Corporate Travel and Expense report, 80% of travelers said they sometimes book off-platform because they feel they can find better prices or more convenient options elsewhere. If you use a corporate travel platform that lacks competitive rates or feels clunky, employees will work around it, and you’ll lose visibility and policy control.

Eliminating the friction of manual expense reports can also increase adoption, and platforms that unify travel booking and expense management can help. When travel bookings automatically flow into expense systems, employees save time, finance teams get real-time visibility, and nothing falls through the cracks.

To take action, audit where bookings actually happen in your organization. If employees consistently find better rates elsewhere, your platform has an inventory problem. If they complain about the booking experience, it’s a UX problem. Both are solvable, but you can’t fix what you don’t measure.

4. Demand Real-Time Spend Visibility

A 30- to 60-day delay in visibility makes forecasts unreliable. Real-time spend visibility allows you to catch budget overruns mid-quarter, identifying policy violations before they become patterns, and making strategic decisions based on current data.

For example, Navan provides real-time visibility into corporate travel spending, allowing your finance team to see spending patterns as they develop. Through integrated travel booking, virtual card payments, and automated expense management, your finance team gains immediate visibility into booking decisions, costs, and policy compliance metrics.

In a Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact™ study commissioned by Navan, a global category manager said, “We couldn’t see what was being spent until the end of the month. That made it hard to manage budgets or catch out-of-policy claims. ... Now [with Navan], our leakage rates are low.”

5. Enforce Policy at the Moment of Purchase

The best way to enforce compliance with travel and expense policies is to automatically flag or decline non-compliant transactions. Debating whether an out-of-policy expense should be reimbursed or not after the fact creates unnecessary friction for everyone involved.

For example, if an employee books a $400 hotel when their policy allows for only $200, you have to choose from two bad options: reject the expense and create conflict, or approve it and undermine company policy.

To prevent this outcome, make sure your travel and expense platform enforces policies at the point of booking or transaction — not just after the fact through approval workflows.

An advanced T&E platform like Navan can automatically decline out-of-policy transactions or require approvals before completion. Navan’s traffic light policy system operates at the point of swipe: green auto-approves compliant transactions, orange flags purchases for review, and red declines prohibited spending before the charge processes.

6. Turn Employees into Cost-Conscious Bookers

Policy enforcement ensures compliance, but incentives can create sustainable culture change. When employees personally benefit from saving money through incentive programs, they’ll book smarter without being told.

In fact, according to Skift and Navan’s 2026 report, 72% of travelers said they would book cheaper hotels if offered financial incentives.

And you can implement a rewards structure that shares savings with travelers. For example, Navan Rewards lets employees earn personal travel credit when they book hotels below their company’s business travel policy cap. The program is fully funded by Navan at no additional cost to the company, creating incentives for cost-conscious booking decisions.

7. Automate the Back Office

Automated reconciliation frees finance teams to focus on analysis, planning, and decision-making. Before automating any processes, calculate how many hours your finance team spends each month on T&E administration. That’s your automation opportunity.

A 2025 Forrester TEI study found that finance teams using Navan save 40% on expense auditing and reconciliation, and that employees save 24 minutes per submitted expense report. Finance teams using Navan also report significant time and operational efficiency gains through automated coding and direct integrations with systems like NetSuite, QuickBooks, and Xero.

8. Capture Money You’re Leaving on the Table

VAT reclaim and per diem compliance represent real money that most companies under-recover. The primary challenge is data capture and documentation.

For instance, international travel creates VAT recovery opportunities, but claiming them requires compliant invoices with the right data fields. Per diem programs offer similar value when documentation is streamlined, but manual tracking creates gaps.

To capture this money, audit your current VAT and per diem recovery process. Calculate how much you’re losing in unclaimed eligible savings, then confirm you’re using a platform that automatically generates compliant invoices and flags tax-deductible per diems at the point of purchase. Navan generates VAT-ready flight and rail invoices instantly. It also offers tax-deductible per diems that eliminate expense reports for meals.

9. Think Proactively About Traveler Support

Travel disruptions are inevitable, but poor support can make a bad situation worse by turning a cancelled flight into a missed client meeting or frustrating the employee. The ROI of quality support appears in both hard costs (avoiding expensive last-minute rebookings) and soft costs (reducing employee stress and maintaining travel satisfaction).

Support also varies by traveler. Regular employees need responsive help during disruptions, while executives need high-touch service for complex international itineraries.

To evaluate the support model from your travel platform, ask:

• Is it 24/7?
• Do your travelers have access to specialists?
• Can agents handle rebooking during disruptions?
• Does it scale from standard support to executive-level service?

Leading travel platforms provide proactive assistance (such as real-time notifications of schedule changes) versus reactive support triggered only when travelers initiate contact.

Navan provides 24/7 personalized support from in-house travel agents who are available via chat or call. The platform allows agents to access comprehensive traveler information and booking history, providing responsive support during travel disruptions.

10. Audit Your Platform Against What’s Now Possible

Corporate travel platforms have evolved dramatically. What was a custom deal five years ago is now a standard offering. If your platform doesn’t deliver the capabilities below, you’re missing out on opportunities to boost your corporate travel ROI:

• Unified travel, expense, and cards in a single system rather than separate tools requiring integration
• Real-time visibility with complete data per transaction instead of delayed reporting
• Proactive policy enforcement at the point of booking and swipe, not retroactive review
• Direct integrations with your HRIS, ERP, and accounting systems
• Adoption rates above 80%, reflecting strong market demand
• Benchmarking and analytics that contextualize your performance against peers
• Support that scales from standard to white-glove

Navan delivers all of these capabilities in a single platform, with implementation taking under 100 hours — versus 1,000+ hours for legacy systems.

The results speak for themselves: VEG saved hundreds of thousands of dollars with savings on flights alone; Literati achieved 22% savings on hotels and 14% across their entire travel program; and Central Garden & Pet estimates 75% time savings on monthly processes.