The Inaugural Business Travel Trends Hype Cycle: 2025 Edition
My perspective on what to watch, what to ignore, and what is going to end up in the travel technology graveyard
If you have a job title that goes like this C<insert either I, T, P or X>O then you probably know who Gartner is. For those that don’t, they are a $6B research and consulting company that provides a ton of industry insights and trend analysis.
For the C<I, T, P or X>O club (I’m in it, too) they publish two product offerings that are staples in the tech world:
The Gartner Magic Quadrant plots out the different companies operating in a specific industry or market segment relative to others (Niche Players, Challengers, Visionaries and Leaders). So anytime you want to talk your CEO or Board into spending a whole bunch of money with a company, it is pretty standard to validate your vendor choice with a copy of the Magic Quadrant.
The Gartner Hype Cycle is probably not as well known, but is also essential to help C<I, T, P or X>Os discern which trends du jour are just hype vs. which are really going to produce long-term value. Because as you’re reading the tea leaves and trying to figure out where to spend your money, making sure you don’t over-index on hype is kind of important.
I personally love the Hype Cycle because the phases it talks about are as real as it gets (and labeled in a plain English style that suits me). I mean who doesn’t want to avoid being disillusioned, and aspire to be enlightened?
While the Hype Cycle is meant to assess technology innovations, I’m going to spin it around a bit and use the same methodology on Business Travel Trends. It won’t be an exact science, but I think it is useful to look at these topics from slightly different perspectives — at worst, you’ll have something new to talk about at your next business travel conference.
Since there is no definitive list of “Business Travel Trends,” I’ve created one based on a few different sources, including the GBTA Business Travel Outlook Report; the Booking.com for Business Top 9 Business Travel Trends 2025 report (which I’m sure was not at all written for SEO); Uber’s The 2025 Business Traveler Playbook (because who doesn’t like a company whose name has became a verb); and Cvent’s 9 Business Travel Trends to Watch in 2025 (which I’m sure have nothing to do with meetings) just to name a few. You get the point.
So, drumroll please, here are the 8 trends I’m going to look at, in order of nothing more than convenience for my writing:
Impact of AI on business travel
NDC
Rising cost of travel
Sustainability in travel programs
“Bleisure” (mixing business & personal travel)
VR replacing traditional travel
Duty of care
Supplier loyalty programs
1. Impact of AI on business travel
I’m going to be bold and put this one right at the Peak of Inflated Expectations.
Why? Because while AI is pretty cool technology, and I do think it is going to change a lot of the ways we work, it is going to take time. The hype for it is completely out of control. In 3 years we went from making funny bedtimes stories with ChatGPT 3.5 to all of our jobs being eliminated by AI… yet despite that, I’m still folding my own laundry.
(As a side note, I’m going to be writing more about this soon. I feel like we’re hitting a point of saturation with the big AI companies, and if I hid the logos from their tools and asked the average person to use one, they probably couldn’t tell the difference between OpenAI, Anthropic, Llama or Perplexity. Just like you can’t tell the difference if this website is hosted on Azure or AWS and, honestly, does it matter? ROI in AI is really only being generated, at least right now, by specific vertical use cases that more closely resemble enterprise SaaS solutions; not by building bigger models with huge GPU farms in huge data centers that incrementally do everything .01% better. You use ChatGPT because of the brand, not because ChatGPT as a product does anything fundamentally better than another one.)
I also think people have oversimplified the challenge involved with getting people to adopt AI technology. When I’m looking for something, or needing something to get done, I often don’t want to spend the few minutes dumbing down what I need to some toddler-level pseudo-language (a “prompt”) just so I can have a fake conversation with a chatbot. I just want what I’m looking for.
Yes, the interfaces will improve over time, but there is still going to be a learning curve. There are still lots of trust issues with AI, and with good reason, because when you dive into how these models are built, you realize there are a lot of biases inherent to what they do. Just ask DeepSeek about Tiananmen Square.
All that said, in my near 20 years working in the travel industry at a TMC, I’ve learned that a lot of what we do in travel is find ways to make travel easier for those who don’t have the time or desire to do it themselves. And ultimately, if you don’t have the time or desire do something, that’s not suddenly going to change because the thing becomes powered by newfangled AI!
Sure, self-service stats will continue to rise, and younger people entering the workforce will be more accepting of AI, and the interfaces will continue to evolve, but all of those big changes will take years. And winning the long game is harder than you think.
2. NDC
I’m sorry to break it to those who bet the farm on NDC changing everything about business travel, but we are well into the Trough of Disillusionment with this topic.
Billions of dollars have been spent across the industry; new companies and voices rose to prominence; major bets were made on consumers changing their behavior; and enough hours were spent debating this topic on LinkedIn and at GBTA to make you question your life choices. Yet, at the end of all of that:
There has been little to no innovation in the booking & servicing experience due to NDC; it is just a little bit cheaper, for a lot more headache.
The seat bought via NDC is still the same seat bought through EDIFACT. Literally, they are the exact same seat.
The companies processing the most NDC transactions in the world were the same companies that NDC were supposed to get rid of - the GDS’s.
Talk about a solid ROI…
To be clear, there is a difference between being optimistic over the eventual promise of NDC, versus the reality of changing a really complicated (and relatively low margin) industry to adopt a new standard way of distributing (that isn’t really a standard at all), and I don’t think either perspective is mutually exclusive. I still hope NDC delivers a lot of efficiency to what is a hopeless legacy and complex process, but how it has happened is as close to a hot-mess express as you can get.
But look on the bright side, the Slope of Enlightenment is right ahead of us! And if we keep plugging away, incrementally improving on NDC without all the unnecessary pressure and noise, we will get there. Maybe.
3. Rising cost of travel
We live in a capitalistic global economy, where costs rise and fall with supply and demand. Travel suppliers have also gotten much more savvy post-Covid with managing their costs and can adapt much more quickly to rapid changes in demand. And business travel has proven itself to be quite resilient across economic downturns.
Long story short: Don’t expect costs to go down anytime soon. In my opinion, it has yet to reach its Peak of Inflated Expectations.
Hold on, I just got a notification of a new post on Truth Social, so let me go see if something has changed…
4. Sustainability in travel programs
Here is a noteworthy fact: At our large global TMC, we can count on 2 hands how many of our thousands of customers have actually implemented real sustainability initiatives in their programs. What do the rest do? Lots of companies:
report on it, due to regulations in some regions
enable features (either third party or ours) that make it visible in the shopping process
ask about it, and put questions about it on their RFP
want to hear about what we do about it within our business.
But, all that said, fewer than 10 have actively changed their programs to address sustainability.
And by “address” I mean they are voluntarily — the fact that the EU is going to be pushing rail over short-haul air doesn’t count! — doing things to drive sustainability in their programs, like:
requiring the traveler to pay for a CO2 offset at time of booking
allowing for more sustainable travel options to be selected, even if they’re more expensive than another logical option (ie outside of travel policy)
forcing the use of sustainable options in certain situations (such as taking the train vs. flying under a certain mileage; public transport vs. Ubers or car transfers; or requiring that staff stay at sustainably certified hotels).
Like it or not, sustainability is definitely in the Trough of Disillusionment. That’s not my personal take, just the reality of something that has had a whole lot of talk, but not a lot of action, in our industry.
And now that the US political landscape is decidedly anti-sustainability and regulations are being rolled back, there is going to be an impact. Many, many companies are headquartered in the US, and it is the largest travel market globally. It is another one of those “who knows” situations, but it definitely feels a bit on the downward trend side.
5. “Bleisure”
My biggest question for this trend: When is “Bleisure” going to be added to the dictionary as an actual word? (It’s been under consideration in Collins since 2012…)
Along with rising costs, I’m putting this one right below the Peak of Inflated Expectations, because I don’t think it has hit its crescendo yet. Everyone is mixing work and leisure trips together, in ways big and small. If you need some data points:
Gen Zers Are Getting to Travel for Work—But They Can't Handle the Stress
…and I could literally share 100 more.
And why not? Travel is a pain, so if you have to do it for work, you might as well extend a day or so and have some fun.
I expect this trend to hit its peak when more participants in the ecosystem actively start supporting it. Suppliers are well into it already, but corporate policies have been slow to adapt. I don’t know of many that actively support blending a business trip with a personal trip, let alone split payments or bypass travel policy to enable it. But this will change.
6. VR replacing traditional travel
I should have mentioned this up front, but over time, there has been an adjustment to the Gartner Hype Cycle to identify what the best and worst innovations look like:
It is pretty obvious by the titles and slope of the lines, but just in case:
Silent achievers are the innovations that don’t make a big splash with grandiose expectations, but solidly deliver value over time. Good examples are things like cloud computing or solar panels. I don’t remember either of them being touted as the next revolution in humanity, but both have evolved into really solid businesses.
On the flip side, the Innovation graveyard is filled with things that were supposed to be the next big thing, but never quite made it. And it’s OK, this is a safe zone, so no one will judge you over your NFT purchase a few years ago…
So, back to VR; where do we put it?
Oh, there she is! Well on her way to joining NFT…
Listen, I have a Meta Quest and think VR is really cool, and there are undoubtedly some interesting use cases for the technology. But no matter how much Zuckerberg has tried and how many billions Apple has spent, it remains an extremely niche product that hasn’t impacted travel in any way. Maybe one day people will zoom around on hoverboards staring at screens all the time because they can’t put their phones down, but that is no time soon.
Ironically enough, with all the money poured into VR, the most successful product to come out of it has been smart glasses, which may have a bigger impact to travel, but certainly won’t be replacing it.
7. Duty of care
This trend is a funny one: it goes up and down like a teeter-totter every time something bad happens in our industry, but it has stubbornly stuck around for decades and is firmly on the Plateau of Productivity.
If you don’t have a duty of care component to your travel program, then you are probably doing something wrong. Whether you’re a large program with thousands of travelers over dozens of countries, or an SMB with only a handful of travelers that book direct, there is really no good excuse to not have a general idea of where your people are and what to do if the sh*t hits the fan for them. We are so hyperconnected nowadays, it is just incredibly easy to share information.
At the end of the day, the world is a dangerous place, and threats lurk in even locations that you would classically think are “safe”. Throw in some “Bleisure” and all of a sudden a business trip to London has a weekend extension to Tangier, and you need to be in the know. Fortunately the mechanisms and tools available to companies to protect against threats are sufficiently mature, whether you use a TMC or not.
8. Supplier loyalty programs
I’m going to bring back the two additional measures for this one, because nothing screams Silent achievers more than supplier loyalty programs.
While we all learned how to make soap during the pandemic, the airlines bet the farm on their loyalty programs, and scored big. Nowadays, without those programs, most airlines wouldn’t be making money — the biggest ones make more money from loyalty than they do operating the airline itself. The economics in the hotel industry are quite different, but their programs have significantly grown as well, and both segments are increasingly making some elements of the experience exclusive to those members.
So, with that as a backdrop, how can this trend go away? I mean, a flight-hotel pairing is the backbone of most trips, and since 99.999% of companies don’t own their own planes or hotels, you and your travelers will be flying or sleeping with a supplier who is going to be pushing their loyalty program. There is no way to escape it anymore.
Now, we all know that business travel still operates in this grey area, where the company is paying for the trip, but the traveler is the one experiencing it — but clearly that doesn't matter anymore. Programs have been marketed direct to business travelers for years now, and there isn’t much companies can do about it. It’s a long swim from New York to Paris, after all.
So it is probably time to acknowledge it, stop fighting it, and start making use of these loyalty programs within your policy. There is a lot of value gained through them, and they can also help reduce your costs. I’m a firm believer that most employees want to do the right thing, and there are enough ways for them to do the right thing while also getting value from those loyalty programs to make it a win-win.
Will that drive some travelers to book direct? Yep. Does it happen anyway, even if you try and shut it down? Yep. Stop fighting the tide.
Conclusions
I spend an outsized portion of my professional life trying to interpret, and make sense of, all that’s happening in the world of business travel. And when you’ve done it as long as I have, patterns and trends emerge. So, why do they matter?
Every day we are dealing with something new. Change is the only constant in this universe, and the moment you get comfortable and feel like you have a handle on the latest fad, a new one comes along:
5 years ago I didn’t have the faintest idea what generative AI was.
10 years ago we all still managed large data centers with servers in them.
15 years ago most of us had flip phones or Blackberrys.
20 years ago having a laptop made you important.
25 years ago my dorm room internet gave out public IP addresses.
30 years ago I used to run a BBS on a 1200 baud modem, hoping no one else in the house happened to pick up the phone and kill the connection.
Each one is different, and felt new each time. But if you approach them the same way, break them down to their parts, and use a consistent methodology to understand them, you find that while nothing ever repeats itself, it does all rhyme.