How to take the stress out of group travel planning

Coordinating travel for a group can get complex quickly. Multiple attendees, different departure points, varying preferences, and tight budgets all add complexity. With the right planning and technology, group travel can stay organized from the first brief to the last arrival.

GBTA’s U.S. data shows the scale of group travel: 41% of business trips in 2024 were group travel — conventions, trainings, and seminars — and meetings, conventions, and events drove 40.4% of business travel spending.^[1] If group movements are still booked on personal cards and reconciled later, that could mean a significant share of trip volume is off-platform.

Scott Blondel, Director, Event Travel at Navan, shares practical tips for planning group travel that helps attendees to travel smoothly while helping your organization stay on budget.

What is corporate group travel planning?

Corporate group travel planning is the work of moving a defined attendee list to an event — with shared dates, policy, budget, and duty of care — rather than a group of unrelated one-off trips. It includes air, and ground travel, hotels, and the reporting that tells you who has booked, who hasn’t, and what it will cost.

If you can’t answer those three questions in one view, you don’t have a group plan yet.

Start with the event goals

Every event serves a different purpose.

Whether you are planning a sales kickoff, client conference, leadership retreat, or incentive trip, understanding why the event is happening should be your first step. Before booking a single flight, align on objectives. What outcomes does the organization want? What does success look like? Purpose shapes destination choices, attendee experience, budgets, and travel arrangements from the outset.

Plan early to maximize choice and value

For a typical mid-sized event of about 200–250 attendees, it’s often wise to begin travel planning at least three months in advance.

Large events usually need more lead time, especially with international attendees or peak-period travel. Planning ahead can help organizations access better airfare and hotel availability, stay closer to budget, reduce last-minute changes, and give attendees more flexibility. For global conferences or partner summits, starting up to a year out can improve outcomes when inventory and group space are tight.

Use your travel policy as a guide

Your company’s travel policy should sit at the center of group travel planning.

Ask early: Should attendees travel together or book individually? Do booking guidelines differ by role or level? Are there preferred carriers, classes of service, or budget caps? Clear answers help you build a travel approach that’s consistent, compliant, and aligned with company expectations, without inventing rules mid-booking.

On Navan Events, attendees can book within event guardrails or their existing travel policy, so you aren’t maintaining a second rulebook via email.

Evaluate destinations through an attendee lens

A destination can look ideal on paper and still fail the people attending.

If everyone must stay at the conference hotel, can attendees realistically reach it from their home cities? Are there enough flight options? Is ground transportation straightforward? For global meetings, teams may schedule side meetings before or after the main agenda, which means different arrival and departure dates. Choosing a destination that can absorb varied travel patterns often improves the overall experience.

Gathering that information early gives stakeholders the data they need to make a decision and reduce the chance of surprises later.

Partner with travel experts

Group travel brings its own complexity: airline negotiations, traveler preferences, changes, and disruptions.

Working with a dedicated travel partner can simplify the process and save planning time. Experienced teams bring destination knowledge, access to negotiated rates and group airfare options, guidance on travel strategy, and support while plans evolve. They can also help shortlist venues and destinations that fit event objectives, which cuts research time and speeds up decision-making.

If your organization already manages corporate travel on a centralized platform, traveler profiles, loyalty details, passport information, and preferences may already be captured. Dedicated support can also help secure more flexible booking terms and improve visibility when plans change, so delays and cancellations don’t turn into a blind scramble.

Navan Events Managed Services handles complex group travel coordination as day-to-day work, inside a central platform with your data, policies, and travelers already in place. You can still run everyday meetings yourself on the platform and bring specialists in when the brief is large, complex, or high-stakes.

How Muck Rack cut offsite travel chaos

Muck Rack is a fully remote company of nearly 400 people. Annual retreats and team offsites are central to how it builds culture. Before Navan, employees booked flights and hotels on company cards with little oversight. Compiling a team manifest for a single offsite took an entire day. With Navan, that work takes about 10 minutes.^[2] That time saving is Muck Rack’s reported experience, not a typical result for every offsite and individual results vary depending on factors such as group size and program complexity.

Katie Selman-Green, Senior Culture and Engagement Manager at Muck Rack, said Navan made it easier to know who has booked, when they’re arriving, and to have the information in one place — including estimated cost in one report.^[2] Muck Rack also reported 88% mobile adoption, 4.4/5 CSAT, and an 80% policy compliance rate.^[2]

That’s the group-travel job: a live picture of bookings, arrivals, policy, and cost — not a spreadsheet hastily pulled together the night before. Navan Events extends the same idea to the event itself: venue sourcing, invites, room blocks, budgets, and attendee trips can all be booked and managed on the Navan platform.

Use event travel technology to stay organized

Technology plays a central role in successful group travel management.

Use Navan Events to plan, source, and run everyday meetings and events yourself. Bring in the Navan Events Managed Services team for large, complex, or high-stakes events — or when you want expert help building a strategic meetings program. That way, you aren’t locked into one model, and moving between self-serve and managed support doesn’t have to mean switching tools or re-explaining your business.

Organizers can set travel rules, monitor booking progress, and view forecast event spend alongside actual costs. Having travel and event data connected in one place improves visibility, reduces admin work, and helps teams make clearer decisions while plans are still moving. That’s also why combining travel and event spend benefits finance as well as operations.

Simplify group travel before the next wave of bookings hits

Group travel doesn’t have to mean endless spreadsheets and last-minute surprises. Start with goals, plan early, follow policy, choose destinations that work for attendees, and connect travel with the rest of the event.

Ready to simplify group travel for your next event? Explore Navan Events and see how meetings, events, and travel can sit in one connected experience.