The systems and processes companies use to monitor employees during business trips, covering both real-time location visibility for duty of care and tracking of trip-related spend.
Travel tracking is the process businesses use to monitor employees during work trips. It covers two connected but distinct functions: knowing where travelers are for safety purposes and knowing what they’re booking and spending. Companies typically pull both from a single source, an integrated booking and expense platform, rather than tracking a traveler’s phone directly.
Duty of care and traveler safety rank as the top concern for 59% of travel buyers managing blended trips, while expense tracking and reimbursement boundaries rank a close second at 55%, according to the Global Business Travel Association’s (GBTA) 2025 Business Travel Outlook Poll [1].
Most corporate travel tracking is itinerary-based, meaning it pulls location data from flight, hotel, and car rental bookings rather than continuous GPS, which limits precision to a city or property rather than a traveler’s exact position.
Navan’s live itinerary map shows where every employee is booked to be at any given moment, built automatically from flight, hotel, and rail bookings instead of requiring travelers to check in manually.
The ISO 31030 travel risk management standard has become a reference point that insurers and procurement teams increasingly cite when evaluating how mature a company’s travel tracking and duty of care program actually is [2].
What is Travel Tracking?
Travel tracking is the set of systems and processes a company uses to monitor employees during business trips. Most programs serve two goals at once: traveler safety, which means knowing where someone is if a flight gets canceled or a region becomes unsafe, and spend visibility, which means knowing what a trip is costing while it’s still in progress rather than finding out weeks later on an expense report.
The two functions get bundled under one label because they draw on the same underlying data. When someone books a flight, hotel, or rental car through a company system, that itinerary becomes the raw material for both a safety dashboard and a spend report. Employees sometimes assume travel tracking means an employer is watching their phone’s location around the clock. In practice, most programs work from booking data, not device GPS, and that distinction matters for how comfortable a workforce feels about the whole idea.
Corporate travel tracking runs on one of two underlying methods, and the difference shapes both what a company can see and how much a traveler needs to do.
Itinerary-based tracking pulls data automatically the moment someone books a flight, hotel, or car rental through an approved channel. The system knows a traveler landed in Chicago because the flight itinerary says so, not because a phone reported its coordinates. This method asks nothing extra of the traveler beyond booking through the right channel, but it goes quiet between bookings. It can’t say whether someone is at the airport, the hotel, or a client’s office across town.
GPS or app-based tracking adds a live location layer on top of the itinerary, usually through a mobile app the traveler opts into. This method gives finer location detail and can trigger alerts tied to a traveler’s exact position rather than just their booked city, which matters for high-risk destinations or lone workers. It also asks more of the traveler and raises more privacy questions, so most companies reserve it for a subset of trips instead of deploying it company-wide.
Why Travel Tracking Matters for Business Travel Programs
A travel manager’s legal and moral duty of care obligation is only as good as the data behind it. Without a way to know where employees are, a company finds out about a canceled flight, a weather event, or a security incident from the news, not from its own systems, and by then it’s too late to help proactively. Most travel tracking sits inside a broader travel risk management program that also covers insurance, destination risk assessment, and incident response.
The financial side carries its own weight. GBTA’s research shows expense tracking and reimbursement boundaries rank nearly as high as safety among the challenges travel buyers report, which reflects a simple reality: a company that can’t see travel spend as it happens is managing its budget from a rearview mirror [1]. A sales director who forgets to update a hotel booking, or a consultant who books an unapproved upgrade, shows up as a surprise on the expense report weeks after the fact instead of a flag the finance team could have caught immediately.
Best Practices for Building a Travel Tracking Program
Companies that run travel tracking well without triggering employee pushback share a few habits.
Collect the minimum data necessary, and say so. A program that only pulls itinerary data from booking channels, rather than continuous device GPS, is easier for employees to accept and cheaper to maintain. Many duty of care tools default to broad data collection, and scaling that back to itinerary-only data removes most of the surveillance concern before it starts.
Connect safety and finance to the same source of truth. When traveler location and travel spend both come from the same booking data, a finance team and a security team aren’t reconciling two separate systems after the fact. Navan’s live itinerary map and expense feed draw from the same booking record, so a travel manager sees who’s where and what they’re spending without switching tools.
Reserve GPS-based tracking for the trips that need it. Extended international assignments, travel to elevated-risk destinations, and lone-worker trips are the cases where the extra precision of app-based location sharing earns its cost in traveler trust and IT overhead, a point most enterprise travel safety planning guidance echoes. Applying it to every routine domestic trip creates friction with little safety benefit.
Review the policy on a regular cadence. ISO 31030 treats travel risk management as a program to review and improve, not a one-time setup [2]. Revisiting which trips require enhanced tracking, and why, keeps the program proportional to actual risk rather than growing by default.
When Should You Consider GPS-Based Travel Tracking?
Itinerary-based tracking covers most business travel adequately. A few situations call for the added precision of GPS or app-based tracking instead.
Elevated-risk destinations: Trips to regions with active travel advisories, political instability, or natural disaster risk benefit from real-time location data that itinerary tracking can’t provide between bookings.
Lone workers and extended stays: An employee traveling solo for a multi-week assignment, especially outside a major city, is harder to reach through booking data alone if something goes wrong mid-trip.
Off-itinerary movement: Field sales, site inspections, and multi-stop ground travel that doesn’t map cleanly to a single hotel or flight booking are exactly the trips where itinerary-based tracking loses visibility.
Sources
[1] Global Business Travel Association (GBTA), "Business Travel Optimism Rebounds as Evolving Patterns, Policies and Technologies Shape the Industry" (37th Business Travel Outlook Poll), October 2025. https://gbta.org/business-travel-optimism-rebounds-as-evolving-patterns-policies-and-technologies-shape-the-industry-according-to-latest-gbta-poll/
[2] TravelRiskSafety, "ISO 31030 at Five Years: The Silent Benchmark in Duty-of-Care Law," 2026. https://travelrisksafety.com/insights/iso-31030-five-years-duty-of-care
Related Terms
Mobile Expense Reporting: The practice of capturing and submitting travel expenses from a phone as they happen, the financial counterpart to itinerary-based safety tracking.
Audit Trail: The chronological record of who booked, approved, or changed a trip, which supports the compliance side of a travel tracking program.
Corporate Travel Policy: The written rules that determine which trips require enhanced tracking and what data a travel program is allowed to collect.
Frequently Asked Questions About Travel Tracking
Travel tracking is the process of monitoring employees during business trips, covering both traveler safety and travel spend. Companies use it to fulfill duty of care obligations, respond quickly to disruptions like flight cancellations or security incidents, and see travel costs before they show up as a surprise on an expense report.
Not usually. Most corporate travel tracking is itinerary-based, pulling location data from flight, hotel, and car rental bookings rather than a phone’s GPS. Continuous device tracking is reserved for specific high-risk trips, and only through an app the traveler opts into, not standard background monitoring.
Travel tracking gives a company real-time visibility into where employees are booked to be, which is the foundation of a duty of care program. The ISO 31030 standard treats this visibility as a baseline expectation, and insurers and procurement teams increasingly reference it when assessing how mature a company’s program is.
No, not with itinerary-based systems. Navan’s live itinerary map updates automatically from flight, hotel, and rail bookings, so travelers don’t need to submit a manual check-in for the company to know where they’re scheduled to be.
Travel tracking usually refers to traveler safety and location visibility, while expense tracking refers to monitoring travel spend against a budget. The two overlap because both draw on the same booking data, but they serve different teams: security or HR typically owns safety tracking, while finance owns spend tracking.
Yes, especially once employees travel internationally or across multiple cities regularly. A platform like Navan that layers safety visibility and spend tracking on top of existing bookings costs far less to set up than building separate tools for each function, which makes it practical even for smaller travel programs.
