​​A Guide to Construction Travel Management

Construction companies typically move entire crews, not individual workers. For example, a mechanical contractor might send eight technicians to complete a hospital renovation for six weeks. The trip requires coordinated hotel blocks, rental vehicles, and meal arrangements — all charged to a single project code — which creates challenges that typical corporate travel doesn’t face.

This guide covers what you need to know about construction travel management, including project-based cost allocation, compliance with federal and state requirements, and approaches that give project managers visibility into travel spending while work is still in progress.

What Makes Managing Construction Travel Different

Multiple factors make construction travel more complicated than typical corporate travel.

For starters, standard business travel assumes that individual travelers will typically fly to major cities for short trips with predictable schedules.

But construction involves crews rotating between remote job sites, extended stays in locations without convenient hotel options, and last-minute changes driven by weather, permits, and project timelines.

These differences matter for how you plan, book, and track travel:

• Crews instead of individuals. Construction typically moves groups of workers to job sites, not solo travelers to conferences. Standard corporate travel programs aren’t built for this kind of group coordination.
• Remote and non-traditional destinations. Corporate travel focuses on cities with airports, chain hotels, and ride-hailing services. Construction projects happen wherever the work is, including rural areas. Trips often require extended-stay accommodations, crew lodging arrangements, and sometimes company-provided transportation between housing and work site.
• Schedule volatility. Business trips typically have fixed agendas set weeks in advance. Construction schedules shift constantly based on weather delays, inspection results, material deliveries, and subcontractor availability.
• Project-based cost tracking. Every travel dollar needs to tie to a job number so project managers can track profitability and catch budget overruns while there’s still time to adjust.
• Higher stakes for getting it wrong. Poorly planned crew travel directly disrupts project timelines and can drive up overtime costs and strain subcontractor relationships.

Compliance Requirements for Construction Travel

Construction companies face compliance requirements that don’t apply to typical corporate travel, such as:

• Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) travel time: When crews drive from one project to another during the workday, that travel time is compensable under U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) regulations. Those hours count toward the 40-hour overtime threshold.
• General Services Administration (GSA) per diem rates: The GSA publishes federal per diem rates for meals and lodging. Many contractors use these as their reimbursement standard, but state laws can override them on public works projects.
• Davis-Bacon Act: Federal construction contracts exceeding $2,000 require prevailing wages. Contractors must submit weekly certified payroll reports documenting wages paid to each worker classification.
• State prevailing wage laws: Certain renovations, like schools and other public projects, might require compliance with both Davis-Bacon federal rates and separate state requirements, each with different documentation standards.

These requirements create documentation burdens that compound when tracked manually across multiple projects and jurisdictions. A T&E platform designed for construction can capture the necessary data at the point of booking or expense.

How to Manage Travel and Expenses for Construction

Most T&E platforms are designed for employees booking individual trips and submitting expense reports when they return. But construction companies need a different setup.

Here’s what to look for:

Require Project Codes at Booking

Every travel expense should tie to a job number from the moment it’s booked. Require employees to select a project code before confirming any flight or hotel reservation. Navan makes this selection mandatory at checkout, so expenses hit the correct job automatically, and accounting avoids dealing with credit card statements full of unallocated charges.

Using this approach, Penn Group, a Pennsylvania-based construction company, eliminated manual reconciliation, saving each accountant 8 hours of work per month.

Adjust Spending Limits by Location

Hotel rates vary dramatically by market. A policy that caps lodging at $150 per night creates constant friction when crews work in high-cost cities, because workers either can’t find compliant options or end up in impractical locations far from the jobsite. That forces constant manager overrides, manual exceptions, and back-and-forth with accounting.

Spending thresholds that automatically adjust based on destination and travel dates, like Navan’s dynamic policy, solve this problem by setting realistic, location-aware limits. Crews see in-policy hotels that actually exist at their destination and timeframe, while finance still controls overall cost by defining acceptable ranges and guardrails instead of one-size-fits-all dollar caps.

Control Expenses Before They Happen

With traditional expense management processes, companies only review purchases after money has already been spent. But expense management platforms with real-time policy enforcement can authorize, flag, or decline transactions at the moment of purchase.

Navan’s traffic light policy system uses threshold-based controls: routine purchases are auto-approved (green), mid-range or sensitive transactions get flagged for review (orange), and out-of-policy or clearly unacceptable expenses are declined based on the rules your company configures (red).

With this approach, project managers can see policy violations as they happen rather than discovering them during monthly reconciliation.

Track Mileage Reimbursements

Crews don’t just fly and stay in hotels — they also drive between yards, supply houses, and multiple job sites in a single day. Manually tracking mileage on paper logs or spreadsheets leads to missed reimbursements, inconsistent entries, and mileage that isn’t coded to the right job.

A modern T&E platform should let workers record mileage from their phone, automatically calculate distance using maps, and attach each trip to a specific project and cost code.

With Navan, field employees can log mileage in a few taps, and those mileage reimbursements flow straight into your job-costing system. That ensures employees are reimbursed accurately, gives project managers a true picture of travel spend, and eliminates guesswork for accounting during month-end.

Look for Mobile Support

Booking processes that require laptops or multi-step approvals don't work for construction crews. When the tools are clunky, travelers default to workarounds — personal cards, delayed expense reports, or skipping the system entirely. Mobile-first design solves this by letting superintendents, foremen, and traveling workers book and submit expenses on the go. Look for platforms that offer:

• Receipt capture and auto-categorization: Expenses should be captured and categorized automatically.
• Offline functionality: Submit expenses from remote sites; data syncs when connectivity returns.
• One app for everything: Book travel, submit expenses, and track card spend in a single interface.

Connect to Your ERP

Travel and expense data should flow into your ERP and job costing systems without manual re-entry. When evaluating platforms, verify integration support.

Integrations ensure every trip is coded correctly to projects and cost centers, reduce reconciliation errors, and give finance real-time visibility into committed spend. They also eliminate the lag and risk that come from rekeying data, which is especially critical for project-based businesses that rely on accurate, up‑to‑date job costs to protect margin and inform bidding.

Navan offers direct integrations with NetSuite, QuickBooks Online, and Xero, plus custom CSV, SFTP, and API exports for other accounting systems. Navan offers direct integrations with NetSuite, QuickBooks Online, and Xero, plus custom CSV, SFTP, and API exports for other accounting systems so you can map travel spend to the right projects, cost codes, and GL accounts without manual work.

Route Approvals Through Project Managers

Route expenses to project managers first to verify the cost code matches actual work, then to finance for policy compliance. This two-stage approval process catches miscoded expenses before they hit the general ledger.

DYWIDAG, a global construction engineering firm operating in more than 50 countries, saw this firsthand after implementing Navan. Reimbursement requests now flow automatically through the necessary approvals without manual intervention.

As a result, the company’s accounting team posts one statement per week instead of processing 10–20 manual payments, and month-end pressure has dropped significantly.

“The accounting department doesn’t have to review reimbursement amounts individually,” said Andreas Poloczek, Regional CFO. “Thanks to the setup with Navan, the accounting department finally has less pressure at the end of the month.”

How to Manage Crew Safety and Travel Disruptions

Construction crews work across scattered job sites, and employers have legal obligations to protect them.

But the duty of care becomes more challenging when employees book their trips outside of your travel management platform, since they’re harder to track. But that’s exactly what employees sometimes do when they find less expensive or more convenient options on consumer sites. In case of an emergency, confirming whether affected workers are safe or need assistance can become an overly manual process.

The key is achieving a high program adoption rate — and one requirement for that is a platform that matches consumer booking speed and inventory. Navan has built a robust, multi-source inventory that connects to traditional GDS systems, direct NDC airline connections for exclusive fares, and aggregators like Priceline and Booking.com.

When the corporate platform offers competitive rates and a range of options, employees are more likely to book on-platform, which helps drive the high adoption rates that make duty of care possible.

Manage Construction Travel with Navan

Construction travel management works well when it supports project-based accounting, distributed crews, mobile-first workflows, and job costing integration.

The financial case is straightforward. According to a Deloitte travel study, 55% of travel managers cite booking compliance as their top cost-control measure.

Navan’s platform not only enables higher booking compliance rates, it also provides mobile expense capture, mandatory project coding at booking, and direct ERP integration — the capabilities construction companies need to turn travel from an administrative burden into a strategic advantage.

Construction travel often changes on short notice. Weather delays, schedule shifts, change orders, safety issues, or equipment failures can force crews to extend, shorten, or reroute trips quicly. WIth Navan, employees can self-serve changes in the app or reach 24/7 in-house support agents who already have full traveler and trip context, so they can execute changes immediately without asking travelers to re-explain their situation.

Schedule a demo to see how it works for construction.