Companies are spending more on business travel than at any point in history. They are not, however, sending many more people anywhere. That gap is the real story in the 2026 Business Travel Index, the annual forecast the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) presented on 3 August at its convention in Chicago – and it has direct consequences for anyone who organises events for a living.
The headline figure is a record $1.71 trillion, roughly €1.48 trillion, up 7.2% on 2025. The number of trips behind that spend rises just 1.3%, to 1.84 billion. A year earlier, spending grew 8.4% while trip volume sat at 1.82 billion. In other words: two consecutive years of near-flat travel volume, funded by steeply rising budgets. GBTA expects global spend to pass $2 trillion by 2030.
The forecast is built on a survey of 4,700 business travellers across 66 markets, conducted in May 2026, and models 72 countries and 44 industries. The United States remains the largest market at $423.0 billion, with China close behind at $403.7 billion; the top fifteen markets account for $1.43 trillion, or 84% of global spend. The fastest growth comes from Brazil (13.8%), Australia (11.5%), South Korea (11.3%), Türkiye (10.9%) and Japan (10%). The Middle East is the outlier in the other direction, with trip volume forecast to fall 12.3%.
Price, not people
The divergence between spend and volume is almost entirely a pricing story. GBTA's companion forecast on travel prices puts the global average airfare at $756 in 2026, up 4.7%, with economy fares up 8.7% and premium cabins up 9.5%. Hotel average daily rates reach $168, up 3.7%, though with wide regional variation: Latin America up 9.5%, Asia Pacific up 5%, North America up 3.2% and EMEA almost flat at 0.6%. Car rental sits at $46.50 a day.
Energy and labour costs are doing most of the damage. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz earlier this year caused what GBTA describes as the largest oil supply disruption on record, feeding straight into jet fuel. Relief is forecast for 2027, when fares are expected to rise just 1.5% and hotel rates 1.8% - meaningful, but it only slows the increase rather than reversing it.
Behaviour is shifting alongside the prices. "Companies haven't stepped away from travel, but they are increasingly more selective and productivity-focused", GBTA CEO Suzanne Neufang said in Chicago. Some 74% of business travellers maintained or increased their travel frequency, and 28% expect to travel more in 2026, so appetite has not collapsed. What has changed is the internal bar each trip has to clear.
Europe: high spend, short trips, and a rail habit
European business travel spending is forecast at €389.9 billion in 2026, up 8.2%, rising to €414.5 billion in 2027 and €441.6 billion in 2028. In 2025 the six largest markets - Germany, the UK, France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands - together accounted for €241.5 billion, or 17.7% of global spend that year. Western Europe represents 88% of the regional total.
The regional detail matters more than the headline. The average European business trip costs €850.7, against €1,305 in the UK and €639 to €646 in Poland and Sweden. Overnight trips average 3.1 nights. Some 38% of European business travellers used rail on their last trip, far more than in other regions - North America sits at 8% and Latin America at 4%. And 83% still consider business travel worthwhile for achieving business objectives, with 77% travelling as much as or more than they did in 2019.
Why this is an event industry story
Look at what Europeans actually travel for. GBTA's top three reasons are seminars and training, conventions and conferences, and internal company meetings. The record spend is, to a large extent, event spend. When a CFO tightens the screws on travel, the thing being squeezed is attendance at somebody's conference, incentive, roadshow or offsite.
Two figures should frame how planners think about 2026 and 2027. Meetings and events cost $263 per attendee per day in 2026, up 3.0%, rising to $267 in 2027, up 1.5%. Compare that with economy airfares at 8.7%. The meeting itself is not what is inflating budgets - getting people to it is. For an international event, the flight and the hotel now routinely dwarf the delegate fee, which means the organiser controls a shrinking share of the total cost of attendance while carrying all of the blame for it.
That reframes the job. If a company will authorise fewer journeys but spend more on each, the winning event is the one that consolidates several reasons to travel into a single trip: the training, the client meetings, the supplier conversations and the industry networking in one place, on one set of dates. Programming that assumes a delegate flew in for your keynote alone is programming for a market that no longer exists. Build in the time and the spaces for delegates to do their own business on site, and the trip justifies itself twice over.
It also puts a premium on being easy to reach. In a region where nearly four in ten business travellers take the train, a venue within comfortable rail distance of major hubs is not a sustainability footnote - it is a budget argument, and increasingly a scope 3 argument too. Regional and second-city destinations have a genuine opening here, provided the connections hold up.
For venues and suppliers, the implication is sharper still. Buyers under cost pressure do not simply hunt for the lowest price; they hunt for defensible value and for transparency about what a day actually costs. Vague day-delegate rates that hide extras will lose to clear ones. And where 57% of European business travellers say they now combine business with personal travel more than they used to - against 68% in North America and 70% in Asia Pacific - there is unclaimed ground in making it worth someone's while to stay an extra night.
The record number, then, is not the growth story it looks like. Business travel volume is broadly flat, and each remaining trip carries far more weight than it did five years ago. For the event industry, that is not bad news. It is a straightforward instruction: the event has to be worth the flight.
Source: Photo: iStockPhoto 1149089650
